ACT I

The swamp cooler in the corner choked and rattled, blowing wet, ninety-degree air into the room, but Cassie Monroy stood stiff on her pine crate like a statue people were supposed to bow to. She was pinned into four hundred dollars of dark blue silk. Down on the second-floor dirt-streaked floorboards, the seamstress knelt in the caliche dust with five steel pins clamped between her teeth, her gray braid pulled back tight with a thick rubber band.

“Keep your hips square, Cassie,” the woman mumbled around the metal. “You drop that hem into this dirt and it’s done. Caliche doesn’t wash out. It stains it red forever.”

“She’s deaf, Amalia,” Malita said from across the room.

Malita sat slouched low in a cane chair, her legs kicked wide and her bare heels resting right on top of three clean bolts of white silk stacked on the low table. Her feet were black with grease and red with caliche dust from the alley, grinding straight into the fresh cloth. She didn’t care. She took a slow sip of warm Herradura from a crushed paper cup and tapped the ash of a Virginia Slim onto the floorboards.

“Look at you,” Malita said, her voice flat and mean. “All that money and you just look like an expensive bruise.”

“Shut your mouth, Malita,” Cassie said, staring at the wall. “You wouldn’t know quality if it choked you. Go sit in your car.”

“I’m serious. The noon sun hits that window and you look like somebody beat you with a lead pipe and wrapped you in church curtains.” Malita didn’t even look up from her cup; she just gave a lazy twirl of two fingers in the air, flicking a careless circle toward the crate. “Twirl her, Amalia. Let’s see if the damage looks any cheaper from the other side.” Malita ground her heel an inch deeper into the white cloth, ruining another two yards of it. “And you’re spilling out of the sides. Your mother had broad hips, but you’re really pushing it.”

“Make the waist tighter, Amalia,” Cassie said, her teeth clenched. “If I can take a full breath, take it in another inch.”

“You won’t breathe at all once you step out into the noon heat,” the seamstress muttered, sliding a pin home. “You’ll just fall straight out into the gravel.”

Cassie looked past them, out through the wavy plate glass of the second-floor window. The August heat was crawling off the pavement of the old road, making the dry brush and the cracked adobe across the way swim in the glare.

Then an engine backfired with a sharp crack that sounded like a rifle shot.

A heavy Ford truck, painted two-tone brown and buried in road dust up to the side glass, pulled off the blacktop and shuddered to a dead stop outside the bakery below. The driver’s door groaned open on bad hinges, and the man stepped down into the caliche.

Cassie’s heart dropped like a stone down a dry well.

He was wearing a gray work shirt with the sleeves torn off at the shoulders, his thick forearms stained black with grease from pulling apart diesel engines and reefer units at the freight trucking yard in Nogales. He lived right across the line in Nogales, Sonora, spending his days wrenching on the big flatbeds and produce haulers waiting to clear the border. He had thick shoulders, a heavy neck, and the slow, heavy walk of a man who spent his life moving scrap iron. He didn’t look across the road. He just pushed his grease-blackened hands into his pockets and went through the screen door of the bakery to buy sweet bread.

Cassie stopped breathing.

A heavy-diesel mechanic who lived and worked down in Nogales, Sonora, did not wait an hour at the international checkpoint, cross the line into Arizona, and drive twenty miles north through ninety-eight-degree heat just to buy three pan dulces. He didn’t do that. It was impossible. The universe had dragged him down that road, through the dust and the checkpoint, and set him right in front of her window. It was a sign.

“Oh my God,” Cassie whispered.

“What now?” Malita asked, the cigarette bobbing between her lips. “Did the sheriff pull up?”

“He’s here,” Cassie said, and stepped straight off the crate.

“Cassie, no!” the seamstress screamed, lunging across the floor. “The pins! You’ll tear the weave!”

“Let go of me, Amalia!”

Cassie yanked herself free. The pins ripped through the heavy blue silk with three dry pops, pulling long white threads across the stomach. Cassie didn’t even look down. She tore past the curtain into the back fitting stall, ripping the pinned silk up over her head in one wild heave. Steel pins rained down, bouncing and pinging against the floorboards.

“He’s going to leave,” Cassie yelled from behind the curtain, her voice shaking. “He’s just buying bread! He’s going to be back in that truck in two minutes!”

“Who, that grease-monkey?” Malita didn’t move an inch. She poured another splash of warm tequila into her cup. “The one from the blanket shop?”

“Shut up, Malita!”

Cassie could still see him in that expensive shop on the American side in Nogales. He had been standing at the register, huge and dirty, his hands resting like iron weights on the glass case while the little clerk sneered and ran the exchange rate down on a thick roll of Mexican pesos. Cassie had stepped right up to the counter without raising her voice. She had laid one cool palm on the glass, offered a sharp, polite smile, and counted out the rate with calm, measured grace until the clerk turned red in the face, dropped his eyes, and took the money fair. The man had looked her straight in the eye with real, quiet warmth, smiled like a gentleman, and said a soft thanks before picking up his wrapped blanket and walking out to his truck. He never asked her name, and he never said who the wool was for, leaving her to turn that gentle, level look over in her head every single night for five long months.

Behind the curtain, Cassie was fighting her own clothes like an animal caught in a wire fence. She knocked a metal coat rack hard against the plaster wall, cursed through her teeth, and yanked her street skirt up from the floor. She didn’t look in the little mirror on the wall. She didn’t have time.

In her blind rush, the entire back right hem caught on the waistband of her pantyhose, jamming four inches of blue cotton deep under the tight elastic. Her slip twisted into a knot around her hip, leaving the pale, round meat of her right buttock completely bare to the room under the sheer brown nylon.

Cassie slapped the muslin curtain aside with both hands, bolted across the second-floor loft, and pounded down the wooden staircase toward the front.

“Cassie,” Malita said from her chair, not even taking the cigarette out of her mouth as Cassie blew past. “Look at your ass.”

“Shut your miserable mouth, Malita!” Cassie snapped, not breaking stride. “You’d love that, wouldn’t you? You’d love for me to wait!”

Cassie slammed her palm flat against the wire mesh of the ground-floor door and shoved it wide open. The glare of the noon sun hit her like a blast furnace as she charged out onto the wooden porch in a dead sprint, completely oblivious to the heat on her bare skin.

Malita didn’t get up. She didn’t even reach out an arm. She just watched the white cheek bob down the porch steps toward the caliche, took a slow, quiet pull of warm tequila from her paper cup, and let the smoke drift out through the open door.

“Go on then,” Malita called out, dry as a bone. “Show Sonora what a woman looks like from behind.”

Cassie’s low heels pounded down the wooden steps and into the caliche, kicking up little puffs of chalky red dust around her ankles.

The heat out in the open was a blowtorch to her bare right hip, but her mind was moving too fast to burn. She kept her chin high, her eyes locked across the blacktop on the screen door of the bakery, marching through the glare. A couple of old men sitting on a bench by the wall stopped talking, their heads turning in slow motion to watch a woman hustle across the road with her pale rear end framed in cheap brown nylon. Cassie didn’t even notice.

The bakery screen door squeaked open, and the mechanic stepped out onto the boards.

He had a warm brown paper bag tucked under one thick arm, the bottom of it already darkening with grease spots from the sweet bread. He didn’t come alone.

Right behind him, laughing at something he had said, a short woman in a floral cotton sundress stepped through the door. She had curly black hair tied back with a yellow ribbon, round, soft shoulders, and skin the color of toasted almonds. She reached up and hooked her arm naturally through his bare, grease-blackened forearm. He looked down at her, smiled, and leaned his head down to give her a quick, easy peck on the mouth.

Cassie hit a dead stop in the middle of the road.

The caliche dust drifted past her calves. The breath went out of her chest in one sour drop. It was like somebody had cracked an egg over her heart and let it run cold down into her stomach.

She stared at the woman. Her arms were too heavy. Her teeth were slightly crooked, and she had the soft, thick waist of a girl who ate lard tortillas three times a day without thinking twice about it. There was nothing sharp about her. No money. No posture. Just an ordinary Sonoran girl clinging to his bicep like she owned the iron in his arms.

Behind Cassie, slow, lazy footsteps scraped across the gravel.

“Go on, Cass,” Malita’s voice drifted over her shoulder, dry as a dead leaf. Malita had followed her out into the shade of the boutique awning, leaning against the timber post with her warm paper cup in hand. “Don’t stop now. You dragged all that silk and four miles of leg out here into the noon sun. Go introduce yourself.”

Cassie’s jaw set so hard her back teeth hurt. Her legs felt like wet cement, but she couldn’t back down now. Not in the middle of the road.

She crossed the blacktop, her soles sticking faintly to the soft tar, and stepped up toward the wooden boardwalk.

She opened her mouth to sound poised and collected, but what tore out of her throat was a harsh, strangled crow, an ugly, bird-like squawk that sounded like a rooster getting its neck wrung in a chicken run.

“Hey!”

The mechanic turned, his heavy brows knitting together against the sun. For half a second, his dark eyes went blank, dropping immediately to the blue skirt jammed deep into her pantyhose and the dead-white cheek baking in the glare. A flicker of deep, awkward embarrassment twitched across his jaw before he forced his eyes back up to the bridge of her nose.

“Hey,” he said, cautious and polite. He shifted the grease-spotted bakery bag against his ribs. “From the wool shop down in Nogales. Right?”

“Yes,” Cassie managed, her face burning hotter than the pavement. “Cassie. Cassie Monroy.”

“Rocky Valles,” he said, offering a brief, respectful dip of his head. “And this is Hanna. My wife.”

The name hit her like a shovelful of ditch water, but it was the word wife that hung in the dry air like smoke off a greasy manifold. Five long months of sleepless nights, turning his broad jaw over in the dark, and she had to learn his name from the same breath that told her he belonged to someone else.

The woman on his arm looked at Cassie, her dark eyes rounding slightly before settling into an easy, open warmth.

“Oh!” Hanna said, nudging Rocky’s ribs. “This is her? The girl who talked the clerk down for the blanket?”

“Yeah,” Rocky said, his voice dropping into that easy, quiet warmth he never gave strangers. “Told you she had a tongue on her. Saved me twenty dollars.”

Cassie froze so hard she couldn’t blink. Her eyes fell to Hanna’s left hand, resting easily against his bare forearm. A cheap yellow gold band dug slightly into the plump flesh of her finger. The blanket. The heavy wool Cassie had spun into an entire private mythology. It wasn’t for his truck. It wasn’t for his mother. It was wrapped around the bed of this round, plain girl who smelled faintly of sweet lard and vanilla.

“He said you were very sweet,” Hanna said with a friendly smile, dimples showing in her cheeks. “I keep it right on the foot of our bed. It gets freezing down in the valley at night.”

“It was nothing,” Cassie choked out, her hands pinned rigidly to her sides.

Malita’s shadow fell across the wooden boardwalk as she sauntered up behind them, a cloud of gray Virginia Slim smoke trailing over her shoulder. She looked at Rocky’s dust-caked Ford, then at the grease on his bare arms, her mouth curling with lazy malice.

“Nice truck you got there, Sonora,” Malita said, her voice flat and mean. “You drive all that way from across the line just for three sweet rolls, or did you come up to give the county a show?”

Rocky gave Malita a long, quiet look, the kind of look a working man gives an expensive stray dog yapping from behind a fence. He didn’t answer her. He just placed a heavy, grease-blackened hand against the small of Hanna’s back, steering her down off the boards toward the truck.

“Have a good afternoon, ladies,” Rocky said.

He walked Hanna to the passenger side and yanked the groaning iron door handle open.

Hanna took a step up toward the running board, then stopped. She glanced back over her shoulder at Cassie, who was still standing rigid on the boardwalk with her hip angled to the sun.

Hanna smiled, stepped back down into the dirt, and strolled right back over to Cassie in a casual, easy gait.

Without a word, she reached around Cassie’s hip with two fingers and tugged the bunched blue cotton free from the waistband with a sharp little snap. The cloth dropped back down, covering the bare skin. Hanna smoothed the wrinkled fabric flat with two quick pats of her hand, like she was brushing cookie crumbs off a child’s lap.

“There you go,” Hanna said warmly, looking right into Cassie’s frozen face. “These cheap nylons’ll eat a hem alive in this heat.”

Hanna turned, strolled back to the open truck door, and climbed up into the vinyl seat.

Rocky pushed the door shut with a heavy, final thud.

Cassie stood motionless in the white glare as the Ford choked to life, coughing a foul plume of black diesel soot into the noon heat before lumbering down the blacktop toward the border.

Beside her, Malita took a slow, leisurely sip of warm Herradura from her crushed paper cup.

“Well,” Malita said, her voice dry as a skull. “At least she fixed your skirt.”

ACT II

The 1977 Lincoln Continental Town Car sat out on the sunbaked caliche flats like a beached butter-yellow yacht baking in a dry dock. It was nineteen feet of untinted plate glass and chrome, parked crookedly alongside a 1968 single-wide aluminum trailer jacked up on crumbling cinderblocks. Heat waves warped off the trailer’s pitted aluminum skin, while the carcass of a rusted Maytag washer sat slowly dissolving in the goat weed nearby. Inside the Lincoln, the crushed burgundy velour held the temperature of an unvented pizza oven.

Cassie adjusted her tortoiseshell sunglasses, slammed the Lincoln’s bank-vault door, and picked her way across the hard-packed dirt.

The warped screen door screeched on a rusty spring, slapping shut behind her. The trailer’s interior hit her with the sour punch of stale Pine-Sol, burnt copper, and harsh Raleigh smoke. A rusted window-unit air conditioner wheezed on its last legs, merely rattling the wood-paneled walls and circulating lukewarm, nicotine-stale air.

At a tiny laminate dinette table, Doña Lupe sat in a worn turquoise smock. A half-smoked Raleigh was glued to her lower lip by a thick, tacky smear of drugstore coral lipstick, a frosted, waxy paste that caked into the deep vertical creases around her mouth, leaving gummy orange rings around the soggy paper filter. When she opened her mouth to draw on the paper, the movement revealed a ruined row of blunt, corn-yellow teeth, mossy with green-brown tartar along the gums, flanking a dark, fleshy gap where her left bicuspid used to be. A mug of cold instant coffee sat beside an open tin of lard. Across the fleshy web of Lupe’s left thumb, stretched between knuckle and wrist, was a faded, prison-blue tattoo from fifty years ago, a crude, blurry smudge of black ink done with a sewing needle that might have once been a cross, a spider, or a botched initial, now resembling nothing more than a dark, permanent bruise under the skin.

“Three months,” Cassie said, her voice sharp and brittle as dry kindling. She dropped her alligator-skin handbag onto the yellowing Formica with a heavy smack. “Three months and four hundred American dollars, Lupe. You told me the novena would soften him.”

Lupe didn’t blink. She tapped a long cylinder of gray ash onto the rim of a tin saucer with her ink-bruised thumb, the tacky coral paste sticking briefly to the cigarette paper before tearing away with a faint, wet click.

“These things take their own road, muchacha,” Lupe said, her voice sounding like gravel being kicked down an iron chute. “Love is stubborn. Especially when a man’s already eating hot tortillas at home.”

“He isn’t stubborn, he’s blind,” Cassie snapped. “I gave you everything you asked for. I did the legwork. I dragged myself down into that filthy ditch behind the railroad tracks while they were at five o’clock mass.”

It hadn’t taken much to find them, just ten crisp American dollars slid across the bakery glass to an acne-scarred counter girl who was all too happy to give up the address of the small brick rental off Calle Rosales and the exact hours Rocky turned wrenches down at the freight depot.

Cassie’s teeth clicked together. She didn’t tell Lupe about the rest of it. She didn’t mention snatching his gray work shirt straight off the wire clothesline while the fabric was still damp and smelling of 40-weight motor oil. She didn’t mention slipping through their unlocked kitchen door into that dim, spotless little house that smelled of scrubbed pine and boiled beans. And she certainly didn’t mention the wooden crib Rocky had planed smooth with his own calloused hands sitting right by the sunny window, draped in a yellow flannel blanket with little hand-embroidered ducks along the hem. That crib had made the bile rise in her throat so fast she’d nearly choked on her own saliva.

“I brought you his hair from the shower drain,” Cassie hissed, leaning across the table. “I brought you the red thread. I brought you the money. And yesterday morning he was at the lumberyard buying two-by-fours with that fat little creature clinging to his bicep like a barnacle.”

“The work takes what it takes,” Lupe muttered, reaching into her pocket for a fresh pack of matches. “The spirit doesn’t punch a time clock.”

“You haven’t done a single thing,” Cassie said. The dead, stale air was thick enough to chew; her heavy ivory pancake makeup was already breaking down, turning to grease around her nose. “I want the binding done right now. In front of me.”

Lupe struck a match, touched it to the tip of her cigarette, and shook the flame out with an irritated flick of her wrist. “You want theater, go to the cinema in Tucson. You want a married mechanic with a baby coming, you wait on the saints.”

“The saints are frauds, and so are you,” Cassie snarled.

Before the old woman could draw another lungful of smoke, Cassie’s hand shot across the table. She swept her forearm flat across the laminate, sending three glass jars of dried rue, a saucer of chicken vertebrae, and a half-burnt candle crashing onto the linoleum in an explosion of wax, shards, and bone fragments.

Lupe didn’t flinch. She just tapped her ash onto the counter, looking down at the mess with the dead-eyed boredom of a woman who had seen fifty crazy women smash the exact same saucer.

“You owe me four dollars for the glass,” Lupe said.

Cassie reached down, snatched a bundle of black tallow candles and a spool of red coarse thread from a plastic milk crate beside the stove, shoved them into her purse, and threw a twenty-dollar bill on the wood.

“Keep the change.”

“Go on then, high-yellow!” Lupe’s raspy voice scraped after her through the rusted screen. “Take the shirt and the dirt and do it yourself! Tie the knot with your own two hands! See what comes knocking on your window when the sun goes down!”

“I will!” Cassie shrieked back at the screen, her voice cracking into that high, strangled rooster crow that made a mangy goat tied to a tire rim tuck its ears flat.

She marched straight to the Lincoln, yanked the door open, threw her purse inside, and gunned the engine. She ripped down the unmaintained caliche trail two hundred yards past the trailer, tucking the long yellow sedan out of sight behind a dense thicket of mesquite scrub bordering a dry arroyo.

She threw the gear lever into Park, kicked open the door, and dropped down into the blistering dirt.

The desert sun hammered her neck like a hot poker. Her linen skirt immediately drank in the red dust as she dropped onto her knees in the gravel. Working with trembling, manic haste, she smoothed Rocky’s stiff, diesel-stained gray work shirt flat over the caliche. She laid the thick lock of hair across the empty chest, pinning it down with the red thread she wound around the buttons, tying knot after knot until her fingertips bled under her manicured nails.

“Look at me,” she whispered aloud, her throat rasping, chanting what little she remembered from Lupe’s murmuring. “Forget her belly. Forget that house. Come to me, Rocky. Break the bed. Break the wood.”

She struck a wooden match and touched it to the wick of a black tallow candle set directly over the shirt’s collar.

The flame caught with an oily spit.

Then the desert died.

Every single cicada in the mesquite scrub cut off at the exact same instant, dropping the arroyo into an abrupt, dead vacuum of sound. Not even the dry heat-wind dragged through the brush. The silence was heavy and thick, pressing against her eardrums like diving forty feet underwater.

The candle flame didn’t flicker. It flattened out completely, burning an unnatural, sickly violet. Its greasy black smoke poured sideways, defying the heat, pooling straight into the red caliche dirt like spilled ink.

A breath of air washed over Cassie’s bare neck. It wasn’t the hundred-degree blast of the Sonoran noon. It was an ice-cold, graveyard chill, thick with the stench of stagnant ditch water, sour tallow, and cold, rusted iron.

A distinct, heavy crunch of gravel shifted behind her, right at the rim of the dry wash.

Cassie froze, the breath trapped like broken glass in her windpipe. She slowly turned her head, squinting through the glare. Nothing was there, just the pale, twisted trunks of the mesquite trees. But the air around her felt occupied, suffocatingly close, carrying an ancient, furious weight that had nothing to do with saints or prayers. It was the sickening certainty that she had summoned a blunt, hungry violence into the dirt, and it was looking right through her.

She didn’t finish the chant.

A sharp, terrified squeak ripped from her chest. Cassie scrambled backwards on her hands and knees, tearing her nylons wide open on the razor gravel. She abandoned the candle, snatched the knotted, oil-stained shirt against her ribs like a dying child, and lunged up the caliche embankment in a blind, animal panic.

She hurled herself into the front seat of the Lincoln, slamming the heavy door shut, frantically slapping the chrome lock pin down with her palm.

Her hands were shaking so violently she dropped the keys twice into the footwell before jamming the ignition home. The 460 V8 roared to life with an angry, shuddering rumble.

Without looking, Cassie slammed the column shifter down into Reverse, mashed her foot flat against the gas pedal, and wrenched the steering wheel to whip the nineteen-foot boat around to flee the wash.

The heavy rear end swung wide with horrific speed. The whitewall tires lost all traction in the loose caliche, sliding off the high shoulder of the track, and dropped both rear wheels dead into the dry wash bed.

The Lincoln’s undercarriage bottomed out on a mound of hard-baked dirt with a hollow, frame-bending CRUNCH.

Cassie jerked the shifter into Drive and hammered the throttle.

The right rear wheel spun violently in the dry gravel, screaming like a saw blade. A massive rooster tail of red dust, brush, and stones geysered thirty feet into the white sky, blanketing the rear glass in chalky crimson grit. The car didn’t budge. The frame was high-centered, front wheels pointed crookedly toward the blacktop while the back tires dug themselves into twin trenches of red sand.

“Move, move, move!” Cassie shrieked, hammering her open fists against the scorching steering wheel. She slapped the column shifter back and forth between Reverse and Drive, rocking the heavy land yacht until the transmission clunked with sickening, hollow thuds.

Under the long hood, the overworked engine screamed, belts screeching like dying pigs. White steam began hissing from behind the massive chrome grille, billowing upward across the windshield.

Then the electrical harness popped with a sharp, dry snap.

The hidden wiper cowl banged open, and the two chrome wiper blades began thrashing across the bone-dry glass at furious speed, screee-CLACK, screee-CLACK, dragging red dust into blind, jagged arcs. A second later, the hazard lights clicked on, pulsing frantically like a manic amber strobe inside the clear fishbowl cabin.

“Lousy, miserable piece of scrap!” Cassie yelled over the racket, pounding her fist against the padded vinyl dash. “Cheap Ford garbage! Useless Detroit junk!”

She hit the dash again, her teeth bared, furious at Detroit, furious at the road, furious at the world, trying desperately to scream away the terror clawing at her throat.

Inside the glass terrarium, the heat had become absolute ruin. Her face was literally sliding apart. The expensive liquid foundation had broken down into chalky, curdled grease, floating on a slick sheet of sweat and puddling into the hollows beneath her collarbones. Her blue kohl liner had dissolved into runny black grease, bleeding down her cheeks in muddy rivers that mixed with the red caliche dust blown through the floor vents, while her rose blush smeared across her jaw like a fresh scrape.

She rattled the plastic hazard knob violently, clinging to the lie that it was just a loose contact in the steering column. But beneath her screeching voice and the mechanical whine of the spinning wheel, that same cold, suffocating weight from the arroyo pressed down through the roof of the car.

Through the un-tinted glass, under the blinding sun, the amber flashers beat across her face, pulse, pulse, pulse, a cheap rhythm she couldn’t shut off. Two barefoot boys by a rusted fence down the track stood motionless in the dust, staring through the glass at her like she was an exhibit in a museum: a manic, melting woman clutching an oily stolen rag to her ribs, screaming about copper wire while the quiet, violent thing she had dragged out of the Sonoran dust coiled itself invisibly around her yellow cage.

ACT III

In the small bedroom off Calle Rosales, the swamp cooler in the window rattled like a handful of loose bolts. Hanna was nine months heavy, her belly stretched drum-tight beneath a thin cotton nightgown, her breathing thick and labored in the stifling dark. In the corner by the window, the crib Rocky had planed smooth with his own calloused hands caught the faint blue glow of the streetlamp, draped in the yellow flannel blanket with the embroidered ducks.

Rocky’s eyes snapped open to a dead, suffocating weight planted right on his chest.

He couldn’t draw air. His chest was paralyzed, pinned beneath an icy pressure that felt like somebody had shoveled fifty pounds of wet caliche straight onto his ribs. With a violent, frantic heave, his shoulder twitched, the paralysis snapped, and his arm swung out blindly into the dark.

His knuckles struck the jelly glass on the nightstand, the tap water he always set out for Hanna’s dry night coughs, knocking it off the edge.

It hit the bare floorboards and shattered with the sharp crack of a lightbulb.

“Rocky?” Hanna’s groggy voice cut through the quiet, thick with sleep. “What was that? Did the glass break?”

“I don’t know,” Rocky rasped. His throat felt full of dry sand. He pressed the heel of his palm hard against his breastbone, feeling the frantic, unnatural hammering beneath his ribs. “Nightmare. Just couldn’t move.”

“Careful, mi amor,” Hanna murmured, shifting her heavy body with a quiet grunt of exhaustion, reaching a hand blindly across the sheets to touch his thigh. “You’ve been having the dreams again. Come back down. The baby’s kicking.”

Rocky turned his head on the pillow, and the breath died in his throat.

It wasn’t Hanna.

Lying beside him in the faint amber light from the window was Cassie Monroy.

She was staring straight at him, her sharp jaw lifted, her thin lips parted in that mocking, bird-like smirk. Her skin was bone-white against the pillowcase, entirely bare of sweat, smelling powerfully of that suffocating, expensive floral musk.

Rocky launched himself off the mattress with a choked, animal sound, his shins slamming into the pine bedframe. He backed violently into the dresser, knocking over a tin of talcum powder, putting every inch of the room between them.

The woman on the mattress sat up slowly, a deep frown creasing her brow as she pressed a swollen hand over the shelf of her belly.

“Rocky, what are you doing?” she asked.

Rocky squeezed his eyes shut, dug his grease-stained thumbs into his tear ducts until red sparks danced in the dark, and cursed under his breath. When he opened them, the vision had melted back into reality.

It was just Hanna. Hanna with dark circles of exhaustion bruised under her eyes, her curly hair damp against her forehead, blinking at him in genuine fear.

“Nothing,” Rocky whispered. The room was freezing cold. He couldn’t stop his hands from shaking. “Scorpion. Thought I saw a scorpion on the floorboards.”

“Come back to bed, Rocky,” she whispered softly, her voice trembling slightly. “Please. You’re looking at me like you don’t know who I am.”

“I broke the glass,” he muttered, keeping his chin tucked, unable to look directly at the swollen curve of her body without seeing Cassie’s pale hips. “Go back to sleep, Hanna. I’m going to the kitchen to get the broom.”

He turned and practically bolted into the narrow hallway.

He didn’t feel the broken glass biting into the soles of his feet. He walked straight across the shards, leaving tacky, crimson smears over the hallway pine. It was only when he hit the cold, greasy linoleum of the kitchen that he looked down and saw his heels shredded, blood pooling beneath his arches.

He didn’t flinch. He didn’t feel a damn thing.

He pulled out a chrome-legged dinette chair and sat down, staring at the salt shaker on the yellow Formica table.

Inside his head, the machinery had finally ground to a dead, stripped halt. The gears weren’t turning anymore. The two halves of his mind, the church boy who loved his pregnant wife and the screaming dog dragged by the red coarse thread Cassie herself had knotted out in the dirt of the dry arroyo, had collided and snapped the driveshaft clean in two.

Break the bed, the voice scraped through his skull, smooth and sharp as broken soda glass. Break the wood.

The notion settled over him like an ice-cold wool blanket, heavy and clear as glass. Rocky looked down at his thick hands resting on the table. The grease worked deep into his pores. The hands that had rebuilt cylinder heads, the hands that had smoothed every splinter off the pine crib so the baby wouldn’t get scratched.

Except there was no baby. There was no wife.

Hanna wasn’t his family. Hanna was an obstacle. A thick, plain creature who had climbed into his house, taken up all the air, and laid a stranger’s child in the middle of his bed to keep him from the girl in Tubac. Cassie was waiting for him. She had been waiting for months up the road, her sharp mouth mocking him because he was too weak to clear his own house.

Rocky pushed himself up from the chair. His shredded heels didn’t register on the linoleum.

He didn’t reach for a knife. He didn’t grab an iron tire iron from his toolbox by the door. That was for enemies. This was just mechanical work. You don’t use a hammer when you’re pulling a bad part off a chassis; you just put your weight into it until the bolts shear.

He walked back down the dark hallway, his bloody footprints leaving a neat, silent trail behind him.

The bedroom door groaned faintly on its hinges.

Hanna had rolled onto her side, facing the wall, the sheet pulled up to her shoulder. Her breathing was deep, heavy with the bottomless fatigue of a woman about to give birth. The little wooden crib sat right beside her head, glowing faintly in the streetlamp.

Rocky stepped up to the edge of the mattress.

He didn’t say her name. He didn’t hesitate.

He stood frozen in the dim, pulsing light of the streetlamp, staring down at her.

ACT IV

The withdrawal from her infatuation with Rocky was no simple ordeal. To get her mind off him, she drank herself to oblivion and oftentimes found herself in strangers’ beds. When her father, a reputable man, heard of his daughter’s reckless streak, he threatened to cut off her allowance and kick her off the property. That was how Cassie’s wild spells came to a halt, forcing her to channel her restless energy into her art pieces.

After everything she’d experienced, often on quiet nights like tonight, she could feel the spirits whisper. They reminded her of her poor attempt at a curse from months ago, a clumsy thing muttered in the dirt that she had long since tried to bury. Her obsession had faded to a dull, distant throb, barely a ghost in the back of her mind.

“Are you even listening to me?” Malita was saying, swirling a drink as she lounged on the velvet settee, flipping through an issue of Vogue.

“What?” Cassie muttered, her eyes fixed on her sketch pad.

Before Cassie could say another word, the carved wooden door of the cuckoo clock on the wall snapped open. A tiny mechanical bird popped out, sounding its single, sharp cuckoo into the quiet room, marking the arrival of one in the morning. Outside, a torrential Sonoran flash flood was sheeting down, the heavy drops drumming a deafening roar against the windowpanes, punctuated by the sharp boom of thunder rattling the glass.

“I think there’s somebody outside,” Malita said, her eyes lifting slowly toward the hallway.

Then it hit.

BOOM. BOOM. CRASH.

It wasn’t a knock. It was a brutal, sledgehammer assault against the heavy oak front door. The deadbolt didn’t just rattle. The entire wooden frame groaned, splinters bursting from the jamb as a heavy, frantic weight slammed against it over and over.

“Cassie! Cassie, open the door! Cassie!”

His voice tore through the wood, high and raw, cracking with a manic, weeping desperation that drowned out the thunder.

“What the hell is that?” Malita gasped, dropping her magazine. The glass in her hand shattered on the side table, spilling amber liquor everywhere.

Before Cassie could move, another massive, shoulder-heaving CRASH split the latch completely. The heavy front door blew inward, slamming back against the interior wall with a thunderous bang.

The man didn’t step through. He pitched forward, sprawling onto his hands and knees across the pristine Saltillo tiles.

When he lifted his face toward the light, Malita let out a high, ragged shriek that pierced the roar of the storm.

Rocky was soaked in rainwater, but the air around him was unnaturally, impossibly freezing, radiating an icy, dead chill that cut right through the sweltering monsoon heat. Dressed in his grease-stained work clothes, deep, jagged self-inflicted slashes tore across his forearms and wrists where he had tried to claw his own skin apart in the frantic haze of his breakdown. He knelt in a rapidly spreading pool of water and crimson tracking across the floor.

“I couldn’t get you off my mind,” he sobbed, his voice breaking into a ragged, pathetic wail the moment his wild eyes locked onto Cassie. He threw a bloody, grease-blackened hand out toward her, dragging himself forward. “You are my heart. You are my soul. You are my everything. I had to be by your side.”

Hearing the chaos, Cassie scrambled backward, her spine hitting the hallway wall, staring down at him in sheer disbelief.

“Rocky… what are you talking about? What the hell did you do?”

“She used to sleep clinging onto me,” Rocky cried, weeping like a broken child as rain lashed the open doorway behind him. “I couldn’t resist. Weeks of it… I just snapped. I had to.”

“What?” Cassie whispered, the blood draining completely from her face. “You… you killed her?”

“Smothered her,” he wailed, his teeth bared in a horrific, trembling grimace. “With the pillow. She didn’t even wake up.”

Rocky didn’t get to finish. Before Cassie could even draw breath, the front entryway erupted. Heavy boots slammed onto the ruined threshold as two Santa Cruz County deputies surged into the house, guns drawn.

“Get down! Don’t move!”

Before Rocky could lunge another inch toward Cassie, the deputies tackled him hard against the Saltillo tiles, driving his face into the stone. A pair of steel handcuffs snapped onto his wrists with a sharp, heavy clack, cutting off his frantic wailing as they yanked him roughly back to his feet.

As the deputies dragged a weeping, thrashing Rocky backward across the threshold and out into the storm, Cassie’s legs gave out from underneath her. She slid down the hallway wall until she hit the cold floor, her teeth clicking together so hard they hurt.

Beside her, Malita stood completely paralyzed, shaking like a leaf, her eyes wide with total incomprehension as she stared at the blood on the floor.

Cassie didn’t need anyone to tell her what she had done. She closed her eyes, feeling the dead weight of the dry wash settle right across her windpipe.

Slowly, she raised her head, looking past the deputies and the flashing red cruiser lights out into the sheets of driving rain.

Standing right at the entrance of the front door, just beyond the threshold in the pouring downpour, was Hanna. She wore her clean, simple cotton nightgown, completely dry despite the water sheeting around her, her belly still swollen heavy with the child she would never deliver. She looked across the sill straight at Cassie with a heavy, unblinking finality as Rocky was dragged past her into the dark.

Cassie couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, and couldn’t make a sound. She only stared back through the open door, swallowed whole by the silence.