Mika Reyes hadn't slept in thirty-six hours, and it showed in the way she opened the door — like the hinges were the only thing holding her upright.
1:03 AM. Wynwood. The apartment was a studio above a closed tattoo parlor — four hundred square feet of controlled chaos that smelled like formula, lavender oil, and the faint chemical undertone of the ink Mika used for her flash sheets. The walls were covered in her drawings: skulls wreathed in marigolds, koi fish swimming through geometric patterns, a Virgin Mary with a gas mask, and — taped above the crib — a single piece that stopped Teo's breath every time he saw it: a pair of angel wings, rendered in graphite so detailed you could count individual feathers, spread wide as if mid-flight, with Naomi's birth date lettered in script beneath the left wing, Elijah's beneath the right, and Luna's centered at the top where the wings met the spine.
She'd drawn it the week Luna was born. Three children. Two wings. One spine. She'd never explained the symbolism. She didn't need to.
"You came," Mika said.
Not thank God or finally or where have you been. Just you came — a statement of fact delivered in a voice scraped raw by thirty-six hours of a colicky infant and the specific loneliness of being twenty-one years old in a studio apartment at 1 AM with no one to call except a man who might not answer.
"I came."
She stepped aside. He entered. Luna was in the crib — not sleeping, not screaming, but existing in the awful middle ground between the two: a low, grinding wail that rose and fell with the mechanical regularity of a car alarm, her tiny body curled into a comma of discomfort, her fists clenched against a pain that lived in her gut and had no cure except time and the specific torture of waiting for an infant's digestive system to figure itself out.
Eight months old. Eight months of colic that the pediatrician called "persistent but not dangerous," which was the medical equivalent of telling someone their house was on fire but the fire was technically within code.
Teo lifted Luna from the crib. She weighed nothing — twelve pounds, a bag of rice, a feather with lungs. Her wailing shifted when his hands closed around her, the same way Elijah's screaming had shifted three hours ago: a half-step down, a fraction less panicked, the difference between drowning and drowning near a shore.
He held her against his chest. Walked. The circuit here was shorter — four steps from crib to kitchenette, four steps back — but the principle was the same. Movement. Vibration. The hum.
Mika didn't hand Luna off the way Janelle had — with a micro-hesitation and a war behind her eyes. Mika thrust her forward like someone passing a grenade, then folded.
She sat on the kitchen floor.
Not slowly. Not dramatically. She simply descended — knees buckling, back sliding down the cabinets, hands dropping into her lap — with the boneless, surrendered collapse of a person who had reached the end of what she could carry alone and the floor was the only honest place left. She didn't cry immediately. She sat. She breathed. She stared at the baseboard across from her as if it contained information she needed.
Then the crying started.
Not Naomi's stoic silence. Not Janelle's clinical composure. Mika cried the way she did everything — without filter, without performance, without the protective layering that older women learned to wrap around their grief. She cried with her whole body. Shoulders shaking. Nose running. The sound coming out of her was not delicate — it was a grinding, animal thing, the sound of exhaustion and fear and the twenty-one-year-old realization that love was not enough, that wanting to be a good mother was not enough, that trying was not enough when the formula cost eighteen dollars a can and the colic wouldn't stop and the collection agency called three times this week about a hospital bill that was growing faster than her daughter.
Teo sat beside her. Luna in one arm. His shoulder against hers.
He didn't say anything. There was nothing to say. Every sentence he could construct — it'll be okay, I'm here, we'll figure it out — was a check written on an account with twelve dollars in it. Words cost nothing, which meant they were worth nothing, and Mika deserved more than nothing.
So he sat. And she leaned against him. And Luna's wailing thinned to a whimper against his chest. And for a while, the three of them existed in the specific silence that follows surrender — not peace, not resolution, just the absence of fighting, the ceasefire that happens when everyone involved has run out of ammunition.
Mika's crying slowed. Her breathing steadied. She wiped her face with the hem of her shirt — a vintage anime tee, Cowboy Bebop, faded to the texture of tissue paper — and said, without looking at him:
"The collection agency called again."
"I know."
"They said they're going to garnish. I don't even know what that means. I Googled it and it means they can take money from my checks, Teo. From my paychecks. I make eleven dollars an hour pouring lattes for people who spend more on oat milk than I spend on diapers, and they want to take money from that."
Her voice cracked on the last word. Not from sadness — from the specific outrage of someone who has done the math and discovered that the math is designed to ensure she never wins.
"I'll handle it," he said.
She laughed. It was not a kind sound. "You'll handle it. With what? You've got three kids, Teo. Three. And I know you love them — I know that, I'm not questioning that — but love doesn't convert to dollars. I can't pay the electric bill with how good you are at lullabies."
The sentence was a mirror held up at exactly the right angle to show him the thing he spent every day avoiding: the arithmetic of his failure. Three children. Three women. A combined child support obligation he hadn't met in full in over a year. Not because he was cruel or indifferent but because the gig economy paid in scraps and his talent — real, undeniable, the kind of talent that made strangers stop and listen — had no infrastructure beneath it. No manager. No platform. No studio. Just a warped Yamaha and a broken Casio and a voice that could calm any baby in any crib but couldn't fill a single refrigerator.
"I know," he said. "I know it's not enough."
"It's not about enough." Mika turned to face him. Her eyes were swollen, red-rimmed, and absolutely clear. "It's about choosing. You chose to have these kids — maybe not on purpose, but you chose to stay, and staying means choosing every day to be what they need. And I need you to choose being a father the way you choose music. With everything. Not when it's convenient. Not when you feel inspired. Every day."
Luna stirred against his chest. Her wailing had stopped entirely — replaced by the dense, trusting silence of a baby who had located her person and was not interested in discussing it further. Her tiny fist curled into the fabric of his shirt.
Mika watched this. Her expression softened — not entirely, not the way Destiny's did, but enough. Enough to show the layer beneath the fury: a young woman who was terrified and too proud to say so, who loved a man she couldn't rely on and hated that the love persisted despite the evidence.
"She knows you," Mika said quietly. "She always calms down for you. Nobody else. Just you."
"She calms down for the vibration. The hum."
"No." Mika shook her head. "I hum. I sing. I play white noise and ocean sounds and that stupid mobile that cost forty dollars. She screams through all of it. She only stops for you. It's not the sound, Teo. It's the source."
Something in those words — it's not the sound, it's the source — hit a frequency inside him that resonated with the tingling, with the glow, with the choir on the radio and the light in his hands. As if Mika, without knowing it, had described the exact mechanism of whatever was waking up inside him: not what he produced, but what he was.
Luna's eyes opened.
She didn't cry. She didn't fuss. She stared at Teo's chest — not his face, his chest — with the unblinking, forensic focus of an infant locking onto something that adults couldn't perceive. Her pupils were enormous in the dim apartment, black and depthless, and they were aimed at a point three inches below his collarbone with a precision that felt intentional.
Her hand uncurled from his shirt. Small fingers — impossibly small, translucent at the nail beds — reached toward his sternum.
And where her fingertips touched his chest, Teo felt a warmth that was not body heat.
It was deeper. Older. A warmth that started at the point of contact and radiated inward, sinking through muscle and bone until it found the place behind his sternum where the second heartbeat lived — the one that didn't belong to him, the one that ran faster and hotter and answered to no rhythm he could name. Luna's touch found that heartbeat and synchronized with it. Two pulses becoming one. Father and daughter, locked into a frequency that existed below sound, below sensation, in the basement of physics where the laws got soft and the walls between things grew thin.
Teo looked down. His shirt, where Luna's hand pressed, was glowing.
Faint. Golden. The same light. Always the same light — as if he had one note inside him and it kept playing whether he wanted it to or not.
Mika didn't see it. Her head was against the cabinet, eyes closed, halfway to sleep, the brief respite of a body that had negotiated a thirty-second ceasefire with consciousness.
But Luna saw it.
She stared at the glow with no fear. No surprise. Just recognition — the expression of someone encountering a thing they've always known existed, a thing that was promised to them before they had words, a thing that felt like home.
She smiled.
Eight months old. Colicky. Exhausted. Hungry.
And she smiled at the light inside her father like she'd been waiting for it her entire tiny life.
Teo held her tighter. The glow faded. The warmth remained. And the angel wings on the wall above the crib watched over all three of them — spread wide, graphite feathers catching the ambient light from the street, as if something in this room had called to something in the drawing and the drawing had answered.
Mika stirred. "Stay?"
One word. No demand. No negotiation. Just the raw request of a person on the floor.
"Yeah," Teo said. "I'll stay."
He stayed until dawn.
[End of Episode 6][Next Episode: "Frequency"]