The morning Clara Velasquez walked into Ironcrest National Bank, she had not slept in three days.
Not the restless, interrupted sleep of a person with worries and a bed to toss in, but the kind of sleeplessness that belongs to people who have nowhere to lie down without risk, who have learned to watch the dark with one eye open and one ear trained toward the sound of footsteps. She had been keeping that kind of watch for three weeks now, ever since the landlord changed the locks on a Tuesday afternoon while she was at her second job and her daughter Sofia was at school and her son Mateo was at the neighbor’s, and she had come home to find her key turning in a cylinder that no longer recognized it and a notice taped to the door in language that was legally precise and humanly devastating.
