What Goes Around

Chapter 6 — Carla Watches

Daniel woke at 2:47 in the morning with the taste of whiskey still on his tongue, though he had brushed his teeth twice before bed.

He lay in the dark and listened to Carla breathing beside him — steady, even, the rhythm of a woman who had no ghosts. The ceiling fan clicked softly on every third rotation, a sound he had never noticed in twenty years of marriage, and now it sounded like a countdown.

The bottle in the kitchen glinted at him from the counter. He hadn’t bought it. It had been there since the Reyes Christmas party in December, an unopened Christmas gift from a subcontractor, and Daniel had walked past it a hundred times without seeing it. Tonight he saw it the way a drowning man sees a rope.

One glass. Then two. Then he sat at the kitchen table in his boxers and stared at nothing until 3:30, when he crept back upstairs, careful not to wake Carla.

He was not careful enough.

“What are you doing?” Her voice floated out of the dark when he climbed back into bed, heavy with sleep but alert underneath, the way mothers hear a baby crying three rooms away.

“Nothing. Couldn’t sleep.”

“Again.” It wasn’t a question. She shifted toward him, and he could smell her shampoo, the same lavender scent she had worn since Miguel was in diapers. “This is the fourth night, Daniel.”

“I’m fine. Big job Monday. Just thinking about it.”

A pause. He felt her watching him in the dark. She had always done that — watched him the way other people read weather. It had embarrassed him in the early years, how completely she seemed to see through him. Then the accident happened, and it became something else. Not embarrassment. Fear.

But tonight her hand found his under the blanket, warm and ordinary, and he thought maybe he was inventing things. Maybe the whiskey was making him paranoid.

“You’ve been different since the engagement dinner,” she said quietly. “Since Sofia came.”

The name landed between them like a stone dropped in still water.

“She’s a nice girl,” Daniel said. Too fast. Too loud in the quiet room. “Miguel’s happy. I’m happy.”

“Are you?” Carla’s thumb traced small circles on the back of his hand. “Because you barely said a word to her that night. And yesterday, when she asked about your old neighborhood — you looked like you’d seen a ghost.”

The kitchen clock ticked. The ceiling fan clicked. Daniel’s heart hammered against his ribs so hard he was sure she could feel it through his palm.

“She reminds me of someone,” he said finally. It was the safest truth available.

“Who?”

He didn’t answer. After a moment, Carla sighed and rolled back to her side of the bed.

“Come to bed earlier tomorrow,” she murmured. “You look exhausted.”

He said he would. He lied.

—

The drinking got worse because Daniel stopped pretending it was about the big job.

Saturday night, after Sofia charmed them all over dinner, Daniel poured a third glass in the garage while Carla loaded the dishwasher. Miguel and Sofia were laughing in the living room, planning the wedding venue, their voices bright and young and full of a future Daniel wasn’t sure he deserved to be part of.

“Whiskey, Dad?” Miguel had called out once, coming into the garage for the extra chairs, and caught Daniel mid-pour. “I thought you quit.”

“Fifteen years,” Daniel said, swirling the glass. “Call it a relapse for special occasions.”

Miguel had grinned. “Marriage to Sofia counts as a special occasion. Took you long enough to celebrate.”

He clapped Daniel on the shoulder and carried the chairs inside, leaving Daniel alone with the sawdust and the lawnmower and the glass in his hand.

Through the kitchen window, Daniel could see Carla at the sink, hands in the dishwater, not washing anything. She was looking at him — through the window, through the open garage door — with an expression he couldn’t read. Not anger. Not quite worry. Something quieter. Something still.

Like someone watching a fuse burn down, waiting for the shoe to drop.

She looked away when he caught her eye, too quickly, and plunged her hands back into the water.

That night he lay awake until 4 AM. At some point Carla got up — he heard her feet on the hallway carpet, heard the bathroom door close — and he pretended to be asleep. She came back and stood in the doorway for a long moment, just standing there in the dark, before she climbed back into bed.

Neither of them spoke.

Sunday morning, over coffee, Miguel announced that Sofia wanted to come to church with them next week. “She’s Catholic,” he said. “Her whole family is.”

“That’s nice,” Carla said, buttering toast she wasn’t eating.

Daniel said nothing. He was staring at his phone under the table, scrolling through the photos Miguel had texted him — group shots from last night’s dinner — until his thumb stopped on one he hadn’t meant to open.

Sofia, laughing at something Miguel had said, mid-gesture, her face turned three-quarters toward the camera.

And Daniel stared at it the way a man stares at a mugshot, memorizing something, comparing something, until the screen went dark from inattention and he realized the kitchen had gone quiet.

Carla was standing behind his chair.

He hadn’t heard her move.

“What are you looking at, Daniel?” she asked softly.

He locked the phone and set it face-down on the table. “Nothing.”

But she had seen. He knew she had seen. She stood there for a heartbeat too long, her hands empty at her sides, and then she picked up the coffee pot and refilled his cup without a word.

At 3 AM the next morning, Daniel sat in his office chair in the dark, the glow of his phone lighting his face from below like a campfire. He had zoomed in on Sofia’s photo until her smile filled the screen, pixelated and strange.

Behind him, in the doorway, Carla watched.

He didn’t hear her this time. But she was there, perfectly still in her nightgown, and what she saw — her husband, sleepless, whiskey on his breath, staring at a photograph of his son’s fiancée at three in the morning — was something she would carry with her into whatever came next.

At 3 AM she found Daniel staring at Sofia’s photo on his phone, and she said nothing at all.