In the icy light of your office, he is always neat, quiet, almost invisible, a man who moves with the discipline of someone trained never to take up space. Here, framed by a splintered blue door with a crying baby balanced on one arm and a little boy wrapped around his leg, he looks wrecked. His T-shirt is wrinkled, his jaw is shadowed with two days of beard, and there is a tiredness in his eyes so deep it seems older than he is.
The baby is wheezing.
It is not the loud, healthy cry you expect from a fussy infant. It is thin and wet and wrong, the kind of sound that catches in the chest and makes the room feel suddenly smaller. Behind Carlos, somewhere in the house, a girl coughs hard enough to rattle a metal headboard, and you smell boiled rice, eucalyptus rub, baby formula, and the stale heat of too many people living in too little space.
You came here carrying anger like a sharpened knife.
