Blood on the Canvas

Chapter 5: No More Secrets

Aaron came home just after nine to find Elizabeth still sitting at the kitchen table, the letter now folded into a small, worn square in front of her, like she'd been refolding it compulsively for hours.

"What's that?"

"Sit down," Elizabeth said, and something in her voice made him do it without argument.

She told him everything — the letter, the eleven years, the debt he'd apparently spent their whole childhood quietly trying to bury. She watched her brother's face move through disbelief, then anger, then something more complicated that settled somewhere between the two and stayed there.

"He knew this whole time?" Aaron said. "All those years, and he just — what, hoped it would go away?"

"I think he thought he'd paid it off. He said the call was them telling him he hadn't."

"And he didn't think to mention any of this before telling us to be careful walking home?"

"He was trying to protect us." Elizabeth heard herself defending him even as the same anger simmered under her own ribs. "He's scared, Aaron. I've never seen him like this."

Aaron sat back, dragging a hand down his face. "So what do we do? Just — walk around waiting to see what they do next?"

"I don't know." Elizabeth pushed the folded letter toward him. "But I think we deserve to actually know what we're being careful of. Both of us. No more of this half-explained stuff."

Aaron unfolded it slowly, read it once, then again, his jaw tightening with every line. When he looked up, there was a hardness in his expression Elizabeth rarely saw on him.

"I'm coming with you Saturday," he said. "Both of you. I don't care what Dad says."

"You don't need to—"

"I'm not asking permission." His voice had gone flat and certain in a way that ended the conversation. "If someone out there thinks they can use my sister to settle a debt, I want to be there. That's not up for discussion."

---

Their father overheard the tail end of it from the hallway, and when he stepped into the kitchen, his face was pale in a way that had nothing to do with anger.

"You shouldn't have to be involved in this," he told Aaron, quiet, defeated.

"Bit late for that," Aaron said, not unkindly, but not backing down either. "You should've told us. Both of us. Years ago, or at least the second that call came in."

"I was trying to fix it before it touched either of you."

"It already touched us, Dad. It touched us the day it happened, we just didn't know it yet." Aaron's voice cracked slightly on that, the first sign of anything besides anger since he'd read the letter. "You don't get to carry this alone anymore. Not this."

Their father didn't argue. He just nodded, slowly, like a weight was shifting somewhere in his chest, and sat down heavily across from his children, and for the first time in days, the three of them talked it through together — half a plan, mostly fear, but no longer a secret sitting alone in one man's chest.

---

Across town, Fernando showed up at the garage the next morning to find his boss, Reyes, waiting for him by the bay doors with his arms crossed and an expression that made Fernando's stomach drop before a single word was said.

"We need to talk," Reyes said.

They stepped into the small office at the back, and Reyes closed the door behind them with a care that felt worse than if he'd slammed it.

"Guy came by yesterday, after you left. Didn't give a name. Asked a lot of questions about you — how long you'd worked here, what hours, whether you had family picking you up." Reyes's eyes were sharp, searching. "I've run this shop fifteen years, Fernando. I know what that kind of visit means, and I know what it means when a guy your age shows up out of nowhere with no résumé, no references, just good hands and a story that doesn't quite add up."

Fernando said nothing, jaw tight, waiting for the part where Reyes told him to clear out his locker.

"I'm not asking what you did," Reyes said instead, softer now. "I'm asking if you're in trouble. Real trouble. Because I've seen guys like you before — guys trying to walk away from something — and I've seen what happens when the something doesn't let them."

"I'm handling it," Fernando said, though the words tasted like a lie even as he said them.

"That what you call it." Reyes studied him a moment longer, then sighed, some of the hardness leaving his shoulders. "Look. Whatever this is — Saturday, right? That's when they said?"

Fernando's head snapped up. "How do you—"

"Guy mentioned it. Not on purpose. Slipped out while he was trying to sound casual." Reyes shook his head slowly. "Whatever you're walking into Saturday, kid, you walk into it with your eyes open, or you don't walk into it at all. Those are the only two options that don't end with you back where you started, or worse."

Fernando stared at the floor of the office, the fluorescent light humming overhead, and felt the walls of the life he'd built for himself pressing in from every direction at once — a boss who somehow already knew more than he should, a debt that refused to stay in the past, and a night three days away that he had absolutely no way of stopping now.

"I don't have a choice," he said quietly.

"Everybody's got a choice," Reyes said. "Just depends how much you're willing to lose to make it."

He left Fernando alone in the office after that, and Fernando sat there for a long time, staring at his own hands — hands that had done things he'd spent three months trying to forget — and understood, with a cold, sinking certainty, that Saturday was coming for him whether he was ready or not.