The Signature

"You look like you slept in your car," Leo said, not looking up from the engine that needed him less than he needed it.

"Didn't sleep." Mira held up the folded page.

He wiped his hands on a rag gone gray with use and looked at it long enough that she knew he wasn't surprised. Behind him, the garage smelled the way it always had — motor oil, cold concrete, the faint sweetness of antifreeze from a leak he kept meaning to find and never did.

A radio somewhere on a back shelf played static-heavy classic rock too low to make out the words.

"You went to see him." It wasn't a question. Leo already knew the answer the way he always knew things about her, the particular radar siblings develop for each other's exhaustion.

"He had a knife wound. That's not the point."

"It's a little bit the point." He set the rag down. "You went and stitched him up and he handed you my signature like a like a party favor, Mira. Like it was nothing."

"He told me you signed before I had a chance to"

"Before you had a chance to fix it. Yeah."

No heat in it, which was worse.

"You've been fixing me since — hell, since Dad checked out. I love you for it. I do. But I signed that paper at nine in the morning. Wide awake. Nobody has a gun anywhere near my head."

"You were tricked. You just don't know it yet."

Leo's face did something complicated — not anger, closer to the look he'd worn as a kid figuring out Santa wasn't real and deciding not to ruin it for anyone else.

"Explain it, then. Explain how I got tricked into a job I chose."

She didn't have an answer that wouldn't require telling him about a loan approved in eighteen hours, a private room built like a hospital, a man who said his father's name like it tasted wrong in his mouth.

Telling him any of it would mean explaining a version of the last three years she hadn't fully explained to herself yet, not in words, not out loud, and some stubborn part of her still believed that if she never said it plainly, it might stay smaller than it actually was.

"I just want you safe," she said instead.

"I know." He picked the rag back up. "Maybe try letting somebody carry something, for once. Instead of deciding the only safe hands are yours."

She almost said something back to that, some sharp thing about who exactly had been carrying what for the last ten years, and swallowed it instead, because it wasn't fair, and being right wasn't the same as being kind, and she was too tired this morning to trust the difference in her own mouth.

A car pulled into the lot — unhurried, expensive in the quiet way that wasn't trying to prove anything. A man got out. Mid-forties. Grey at the temples that had nothing to do with age. He moved like someone who'd never had to hurry for anyone in his life.

"Leo. You ready?"

Leo wiped his hands on his jeans, a habit Mira recognized from childhood, the nervous tell of a boy about to say something he wasn't sure he wanted heard. "Five minutes, Marco." He glanced at Mira, something apologetic in it, though she couldn't say to which of them.

"This is my sister."

Marco's eyes moved to her, unhurried the way Nico's had been, though nothing else about him carried the same weight.

"The surgeon."

Something flickered — not recognition, not guilt, and it was gone before she could hold it.

"We've heard good things."

"I bet you have."

He smiled like he understood exactly what she wasn't saying, and turned to go — and it was only reaching his car that he said it. Not to her. Barely to anyone.

The kind of thing that slips out before a man catches it, half-swallowed by the sound of his own door opening.

"She has his eyes."

Mira went still. "Whose eyes."

He didn't turn around. Got in, pulled away, gone, taillights shrinking down the block until they turned a corner and vanished entirely, and she stood in the open bay door with her heart going too fast for a sentence that made no sense at all

— filing it next to the flicker in his eyes, next to a scar and a niece she didn't know existed yet.

"I have to go," Leo said, already reaching for his jacket.

"Leo, wait—"

He hugged her, quick and hard, and then he was gone. Taillights, behind Marco's. Gone around the corner before she'd fully processed the shape of his goodbye.

Mira stood alone in a garage that smelled like motor oil and metal, the overhead fluorescent buzzing faintly above her, holding a folded page with her brother's name on it, turning four words over and over that meant nothing to her and somehow felt like the truest thing anyone had said all week.

She looked down at the paper again. Leo Castell, the signature slanted the same way it had since he was twelve, the same stubborn upward tilt at the end of his last name, like even his handwriting refused to admit defeat.

She thought about calling the number on Marco's business card, if he'd left one, if she'd thought to ask for one, and realized she hadn't even gotten that far before he'd already been gone.

The fluorescent light overhead flickered once, buzzed, steadied. Somewhere outside a car alarm went off two streets over, three short bursts and silence, the kind of sound a city produced so constantly that nobody bothered looking up anymore.

She folded the page back along its original crease and put it in her coat pocket, next to her keys, next to a receipt she'd meant to throw away for a week, and locked up the garage bay behind her because Leo had forgotten to, because Leo forgot things like that now, distracted by whatever new weight he was carrying that he hadn't told her about yet.