A neighborhood just like the one he had run from.
“Sir?” Salazar said after a moment.
Daniel blinked. “Sorry?”
“I asked if you wanted to inspect the east foundation.”
“Yes. Of course.”
They finished the tour. Salazar was pleased. The site was on schedule. The numbers were healthy. Any other day, Daniel would have left satisfied and returned to his hotel to prepare for dinner with investors.
Instead, twenty minutes later, he found himself driving without direction.
Or rather, driving toward a direction he had spent sixteen years pretending he had forgotten.
He told himself he only wanted to see how the neighborhood had changed.
He told himself it was nostalgia, nothing more.
He told himself many things in those first ten minutes.
Then his car turned onto Riverside Avenue, and the lies stopped.
There it was.
The house was smaller than memory had preserved it. The paint was peeling in broad tired strips. One corner of the roof sagged. The front gate leaned inward as though it, too, was exhausted. But it was the same house. The same narrow porch. The same window where light used to glow while a young woman laughed from inside.
Daniel slowed, then pulled over two houses away.
His hands tightened on the steering wheel.
For a long moment, nothing happened.
Then the front door opened, and Valentina stepped out.
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