Sofia Vasquez

The alley behind the brownstone was a graveyard of splintered beams and shattered glass, the air thick with the acrid bite of smoke and the faint, sweet rot of something older than fire. I stood in the rubble, my cane sunk into a pile of ash that had once been our kitchen table, the one where Javier taught Elena to chop onions without crying, where Marco first soldered a circuit board at age nine, where I’d stitched Alexander’s wounds after the warehouse and pretended my hands ...