You had rehearsed the speech all the way from downtown, every clean, cutting sentence about responsibility and excuses and standards. Three absences in one month, you told yourself, meant disrespect. Three years of loyalty did not matter if a person started slipping. That logic had always served you well in the towers of glass and polished stone where your word changed lives with a signature.
Now it feels embarrassingly overdressed.
Carlos stares at you as if your black Mercedes is still parked in his doorway, impossible and obscene. For one second he looks afraid, not because you are his boss, but because you are a complication he absolutely cannot afford. Then he shifts the baby higher on his shoulder and says, in a voice rough with exhaustion, “Señora Mendoza, I’m sorry. I was going to call.”
The little boy presses his face into Carlos’s thigh.
He cannot be older than six. His hair sticks up in soft dark whorls, and he is barefoot on cracked tile, clutching a plastic dinosaur missing one leg. He peeks up at you with solemn eyes, then looks down again, as if he already understands that women dressed like you usually arrive with bad news tucked neatly into folders.
You open your mouth to speak, but the girl in the back room coughs again.
