I leaned against the wall of the candy shop and tried to slow my breathing, but my vision was getting hazy and everything seemed so crushingly close. I was sweating through my shirt, could feel the dampness collecting and dripping along the backs of my knees. Taped to the glass was a poster of the missing girl, Julie Zale, her photo blanched by the sun.

The anxiety took over, blotted out my thoughts until everything was constricted, filtered through a physical, illogical terror: the heat that seared through my body, the certainty that a curtain of black would fall over my eyes, knowing that my heart was rushing rushing rushing, but there would soon be a pinch of pain in my chest and it would stop. You will fall before you will rise.

It felt like a curse.

LUIS

HE WATCHES HER AT WORK as much as he can without getting caught. A few times she’s tried to speak to him, but someone must have told her that he’s not like everyone else. She’s awkward when she mimes things to him. Points at her watch, then at the mop, her cheeks and neck going red. He dunks the mop into the bucket. She smiles at him, and that’s when he remembers where he has seen her before. He thinks of the man who used to come into the bakery in the mornings, his easy grin, the way Luis never had to wonder what he wanted: a single roll and a cup of coffee, nearly white with cream.

In the break room Luis reaches into his wallet, finds the $2 bill, turns it over, runs his finger along the squiggle on the back. The man always gave him an extra dollar, pressed the single bill into his hand, but that day he must have been out. He raised his eyebrows at Luis as Luis eyed the bill, its careful, intricate design. Then, the man didn’t come the next morning and Luis had a bad feeling. The day before he had been sliding a tray of rolls from the oven when he felt the boom in his feet. His boss ran out the door to see what had happened, came back with his hand over his mouth, scrambled for the telephone. A few days later, the man’s picture was in the newspaper, a grainy gray and white that flattened his smile.

Luis and the owner of the bakery had gone to the churches—so many of those pictures were of men who came in for breakfast, lunch, coffee—and it was in one of those churches where he’d seen her, the girl with the man’s same eyes. She leaned against another woman with dark hair, both of them in black, as they followed the coffin out of the church. It was like seeing the man again, even as her eyes blurred with tears.