The city moved on without him.
A few days passed, then a few more, and nothing cracked open. No sirens came looking. No names were spoken too loudly. Whatever had happened to the man—whether he dragged himself to a hospital or bled it out somewhere quiet—never reached Samuel. And even if it had, he doubted it would have mattered.
Life settled back into motion, dull and efficient.
Samuel fell deeper into the game with a kind of calm that scared even him. Whatever fear had once lived in his chest—fear shaped by Ringo's death, by his mother's slow disappearance—had burned out. There was no hesitation left to scrape against his decisions. Only momentum.
He left the single room he had shared with his mother behind. Tomas and Joseph did too. They moved out of Vista Heights and into a three-bedroom apartment somewhere less familiar, somewhere that didn't remember them. The place was bigger, cleaner, temporary in the way all things were now. A base. Not a home.
Business expanded. They got a car. They moved faster, wider, brushing shoulders with the police once or twice—nothing serious. Money smoothed it over. Money always did. Deals were made in parking lots and back rooms, hands passing envelopes with practiced indifference. Samuel learned the rhythm quickly. Learned how not to think.
It was Tomas who ran into her first.
He came back to the apartment that evening with a strange look on his face, something caught between disbelief and curiosity.
"Yo," he said, dropping his keys on the table. "You'll never guess who I saw today."
Samuel barely looked up. "Who."
Tomas smiled. "Esther."
The name landed heavier than Samuel expected. It pressed into his chest, waking something that had been dormant for years.
"Esther?" he repeated.
"Yeah," Tomas said. "At the mall. Thought I was seeing things at first."
Samuel didn't respond right away. His mind reached backward, pulling images from another life—before hospitals, before funerals, before everything collapsed inward. He nodded once, slowly.
A few days later, she came by.
When Esther stepped into the apartment, Samuel felt the years between them all at once. She was older now—twenty, grown into herself. The softness of her face had sharpened, matured. Her presence carried weight. She smiled when she saw him, but there was caution in it too, a carefulness shaped by loss.
"Samuel," she said.
"Esther."
They stood there for a moment, suspended. Then conversation filled the space—simple at first. How have you been. Where are you living now. Tomas and Joseph stayed close, easing the awkwardness, keeping the room alive with voices and movement.
Later, when the apartment quieted and it was just the two of them, the real questions surfaced.
"I tried calling you," Esther said gently. "I reached out. You never answered."
Samuel looked away. "A lot was happening."
She nodded. She didn't push. She understood more than he expected. They talked then—not all at once, not cleanly, but honestly. About Ringo. About her brother. About his mother. The grief mirrored itself between them, different shapes cut from the same wound. In that shared understanding, something loosened.
Weeks passed. Then months.
They started seeing each other regularly—walks through the city, late-night conversations, quiet meals. Samuel found himself telling her things he hadn't said out loud before. Esther listened without judgment. Somewhere in that space, they began dating—not loudly, not ceremonially. It simply became true.
One evening, after they'd been together for a while, Esther called him.
"I want to treat you to something," she said. "Come by my job later."
The restaurant was modest, warm with noise and clatter. Esther moved through it with practiced ease, comfortable in her role. Samuel sat where she could see him, watching her work, feeling strangely out of place among the ordinary.
At one point, she leaned toward him and gestured slightly.
"Oh—this is Mary," she said. "She's my friend."
Mary looked up.The moment was brief, almost nothing. She was around Esther's age—light-skinned, pale where Esther was dark, her hair pulled back neatly. Her eyes met Samuel's for a fraction of a second longer than politeness required. There was something unreadable there. Then she smiled, small and careful, and looked away.
"Nice to meet you," Samuel said.
Mary nodded. "You too."
That was it. No weight. No significance. Just a name, a face, a passing introduction in a place filled with noise.
And yet—
Leviticus speaks from the present, his voice steady, unadorned:
That was how my father met my mother