PART 2: The laboratory said fifteen business days.

It sounded like nothing when the woman at the shipping counter said it. Fifteen business days. Three ordinary weeks. People waited longer for car parts, insurance approvals, back-ordered appliances, refund checks. But those fifteen business days did not feel ordinary to me. They felt like a sentence I had given myself and Lucía without telling her there had even been a trial.

We were living in San Antonio then, in a small beige house on the south side with a cracked driveway, a lemon tree that refused to grow straight, and a porch light that flickered whenever it rained. Lucía had built her salon, Luz de Luna, in a rented storefront between a tax office and a panadería on South Flores Street. I worked as an electrician, mostly commercial jobs, crawling above ceiling tiles and inside unfinished walls, fixing what other men had hidden badly. I knew how to trace a short. I knew how to test a live wire before touching it. I knew the danger of assuming the problem was where the sparks appeared.

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