Lina's Loyalties Tested

The air in their small, cluttered farmhouse had taken on a sticky, heavy quality, thick not just with the collective smoke and the cloying sweetness of stale weed, but with the palpable disapproval radiating from the nearby town. Rene sensed it in the way Mrs. Henderson squinted down the road when she drove past on her rusted-out Ford, and Dion felt it in the perfectly aligned shadows that seemed to mock his own inability to keep the yard immaculate—the weeds, spitefully, grew taller every night.

Lina felt it most acutely, a cold knot tightening beneath her ribs whenever the distant sound of a siren wailed, even if it was just an ambulance heading toward the highway. Her ankle bracelet felt heavier these days, a constant, buzzing reminder of the fragile truce she maintained with Mr. Barlow, her parole officer, a man whose patience seemed inversely proportional to the amount of chaos emanating from their property line.

“He called again, Rene,” Lina said, stirring a mug of lukewarm instant coffee with a frayed plastic straw. She sat at the kitchen table, the only surface that Dion hadn’t yet managed to triple-layer with newspapers detailing government plots and alien seed planting.