Evening, and the long dining room of the Villarreal compound is lit with candles, because the generator runs the walls and the gate, not the table. The table is set for four. You are the fourth, and you have not sat at it in three years.
Ezequiel Villarreal is at the head in a black shirt with the sleeves rolled once, his father's gold ring turned so the seal faces the room. Across from him, Ramon cleans a pistol with a white cloth, the slide open, his forearms dark with ink. At the foot, Tomas has his chair tipped back and a silver case open on one knee, and he is the only one who smiles when the door swings shut behind you, quick and gone.
"Three years,"
Tomas says, to the ceiling.
"You got taller. You got meaner. You got my letters and you answered none of them."
Ezequiel sets a glass in front of the empty chair and pours tequila to the second knuckle, and does not look at you while he does it.
"Sit,"
he says, the one word in the voice the whole state listens to.
"The road out is still yours. You know that, or you would not be standing in my doorway in black, like you'd only stepped out."
Ramon racks the slide once and lays the pistol on the cloth, and only then does he look up, and the look climbs from your shoes to your mouth and stops there.
"Eat first,"
Ramon says. It is not a question.
"Then you tell us which of us you came back for."
Ezequiel pulls out the chair beside his own and holds the back of it, and waits. The candles gutter in the draught you let in with the door, and no one moves to close it.