I checked my balance.

The number on the screen was $1,847.23.

The motorcycle payment was $312 by midnight.

Lia’s tuition installment was $890, due in four days.

The math didn’t work. It hadn’t worked for three weeks. Every night I closed the gap a little, and every morning it opened again.

I sat at the curb outside a place called Liberty Bucket. Freedom Fried Chicken. The name had never decided if it was a joke. The smell of oil and something charred drifted from the vent above the door.

I pressed my palm flat against the bike’s tank. Felt the engine cooling beneath my hand, a slow pulse, fading. The city moved around me without sound. Headlights swept past. A man walked a dog that pulled hard against the leash. A woman stood at a crosswalk, looking at her phone, the screen light catching the underside of her face.

All of it silent.

All of it at a distance I had learned to measure in inches rather than decibels.

…

I opened my phone. Not the app, the other thing. A video. Lia at the kitchen table with a cake that listed slightly to one side. She was signing happy birthday into the camera, talking out loud at the same time the way she did when she forgot she was filming.

I pressed play.

Her mouth moved. Her hands moved. The cake had one candle that kept threatening to tip. She caught it twice without stopping the signing.

The speaker pushed small tremors into my palm, her voice in them somewhere, too faint to catch, too there to ignore. Not sound. Just the shape of it. Thirty seconds of her voice, right there in my hand and nowhere I could reach.

I watched it through to the end.

Then I watched it again.

…

It was 2:31 a.m. when the phone did something different.

Not a ping. Something heavier, a vibration that ran longer than usual, like a hand pressing down instead of tapping. The screen shifted color. Deep red bleeding in from the edges, slow and certain, the way heat moves through metal.

I pulled over.

VIP ASSIGNMENT INCOMING. EXTREME PRIORITY.

PAYOUT: $180.00 DISTANCE: 4.8 KM

CONDITION: 5-STAR RATING GUARANTEE. MUST ACCEPT. NO CANCELLATION ALLOWED.

I read it twice.

$180.

4.8 kilometers.

The number was wrong. Not too low, wrong in the other direction. Nobody paid $180 for 4.8 kilometers. Nobody guaranteed five stars. Nobody sent an offer that landed exactly in the gap between what you had and what you owed, as if it had measured the distance first.

I knew this.

I also knew that knowing it didn’t change anything.

The screen pulsed once, slow, red, patient.

I tapped ACCEPT.