Blood on the Canvas

Chapter 12: Weight Shifts

Fernando stood frozen for a long moment before he made himself move, easing toward the door on silent feet, every nerve in his body braced for the worst version of who might be standing on the other side.

He checked the peephole.

Reyes.

The relief that hit him was almost as disorienting as the fear had been a second earlier. He unlocked the door and opened it to find his boss standing there in a jacket thrown on over pajama pants, phone still in one hand, his face drawn and worried in a way Fernando had never seen on him before.

"You didn't answer your phone," Reyes said, pushing past him into the apartment without waiting for an invitation. "I saw the news. Cobalt district. I've been calling for twenty minutes."

"I'm fine," Fernando said automatically, the lie tasting exactly as hollow as it had every other time he'd said it this week.

Reyes studied him for a long moment — the pale, shaking hands, the television still muted on a livestream Fernando hadn't been able to turn off, the hollow, wrecked look in his eyes — and whatever he saw there made him sit down heavily on the arm of the apartment's one chair, some of the urgency draining out of him and leaving something quieter and more concerned in its place.

"You were there," Reyes said. Not a question.

Fernando didn't answer, which was answer enough.

"Someone died tonight," Reyes said. "It's already all over the news. You want to tell me what happened, or you want to keep standing there pretending you're fine while you fall apart in front of me?"

"I can't." Fernando's voice cracked on the words. "I can't talk about it. I don't even — I don't know if it was me, Reyes. I don't know if I'm the one who—"

He couldn't finish the sentence. Reyes crossed the small room and put a firm hand on his shoulder, the same gesture a father might use, though Reyes had never once claimed that role for himself.

"Listen to me," Reyes said. "Whatever happened tonight, whatever you did or didn't do — you don't get to decide right now what it means. Not tonight. Not like this." His grip tightened slightly. "You get some sleep. Tomorrow, we figure out what you actually know, and what you're gonna do about it. But not tonight. Tonight you just breathe."

Fernando nodded, though breathing felt like the hardest thing anyone had ever asked him to do. Reyes stayed another hour, saying little, just present, a steady weight in the room that kept Fernando from sinking entirely into the spiral waiting to swallow him — making him a cup of tea neither of them touched, sitting in silence while the muted television kept looping the same three seconds of yellow police tape and flashing lights, over and over, until Fernando finally asked him to turn it off. When he finally left, promising to check in first thing in the morning, Fernando sat alone again in the silence, staring at his own hands under the lamp light, searching them for some visible sign of what they might have done.

There wasn't one. There never was, with hands. That was the cruelty of it — they looked exactly the same whether they'd built something or destroyed it.

---

Sunday morning arrived gray and overcast, as if the sky itself had absorbed some of what the night before had cost.

Bianca hadn't slept. She lay in her childhood bed, in the room she'd shared a thousand secrets in over video calls with Elizabeth, staring at the ceiling and replaying the hospital hallway on a loop she couldn't make stop — the nurse's hopeful face, the alarm, the doctor's second, devastating appearance. She kept trying to locate the exact moment things had gone wrong, as if finding it might somehow let her go back and choose differently, though there had never been a choice to make. That was the worst part. There had been nothing for her to do differently at all.

Her mother knocked softly around nine and came in without waiting for an answer, sitting on the edge of the bed the way she used to when Bianca was small and running fevers.

"You should eat something," her mother said gently.

"I'm not hungry."

"I know." Her mother smoothed Bianca's hair back anyway, the gesture more for her own comfort than Bianca's, maybe, though Bianca let her do it regardless. "Elizabeth's father called. They're going to have a viewing later this week, once — once everything's been arranged. He wanted you to know you're welcome anytime. Said you were like a daughter to him too."

Bianca's throat closed entirely at that, and she turned her face into the pillow, unable to hold back the fresh wave of grief that crashed over her at the thought of walking into a room and seeing Elizabeth laid out still and cold, nothing at all like the girl who'd stolen pens and sung off-key and laughed too loud in restaurants.

"I don't know if I can do that," she whispered.

"You don't have to decide today," her mother said. "You don't have to decide anything today."

Downstairs, Bianca could hear the low murmur of her father's voice on the phone — calling in sick to a job search interview he'd scheduled for Monday, she realized dimly, canceling plans nobody could have anticipated needing to cancel. She heard the specific, careful quiet underneath his voice that told her he hadn't been drinking yet today, and some small, exhausted part of her was grateful for that much, even now.

Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. Aaron.

Funeral's Thursday. Dad's a mess. I don't know how to do any of this.

Bianca stared at the message for a long time before she managed to type back, her fingers clumsy and slow.

Neither do I. But we'll figure it out together. I'm not going anywhere.

The reply came a minute later, and this time there was a photo attached.

Found this taped to our front door twenty minutes ago. Dad's freaking out. Can you come over right now?

Bianca opened the image with shaking fingers. It was a single folded piece of paper, photographed against the doorframe — and scrawled across it in thick, deliberate handwriting were words that made her stomach drop straight through the floor:

Sorry about your girl. Consider the rest of the debt forgiven. We're square now.

Bianca read it three times, her mind refusing to fully process what it meant. Not an accident, then — or not entirely. Someone connected to the very people her family had feared all week was now taking credit for the worst thing that had ever happened to her, twisting it into some grotesque form of settlement, like Elizabeth's whole life had been reduced to a number on a ledger they could finally cross off and close.

Something inside Bianca that had spent the last twelve hours drowning in grief suddenly, violently, caught fire instead.

Square now. Like Elizabeth's death was a transaction. Like her best friend — her laugh, her stubbornness, her unfinished sketchbook, the entire eleven years of her existence — had been worth exactly one canceled debt to the people who'd taken her.

Bianca's hands shook so hard she nearly dropped the phone, but it wasn't fear making them shake anymore. Something colder had moved in underneath it, something with teeth, and for the first time since the hospital hallway, the word looping through her head wasn't no.

It was who.

She was going to find out exactly who had written those words. And whoever it was, she promised herself right there in her childhood bed, phone gripped hard enough to hurt — they were going to learn that Elizabeth's life was never something they could just write off.