His wife had left him five years ago, unable to bear the silence or the way Marcelo looked at him as if he were a broken contract for which he could not claim compensation.
“There’s a lot of traffic on the Paulista, sir,” Tiago, his driver, said quietly. “Protest or accident. I’ll take the lower bypass through Vila Buarquén.”
Marcelo didn’t mumble. He didn’t nod. He just let the world spin around him.
They descended from the silvery heights of the wealthy into the worn-out bay of the old city center. There the buildings were toothless, their broken and boarded-up windows like blind eyes. Graffiti crawled on the walls like colored amber, marking the area of despair.
Then the car slowed down.
It wasn’t a traffic light. It was a hesitation. Tiago was an experienced driver, but even he felt the sudden change in the atmosphere of the apartment building they had entered.
To the left stood the skeleton of a construction site, a project abandoned during the 2014 disaster. It was a carcass of rusty poles and rotting plywood, half-eaten by tropical weeds growing with a voracious appetite.
Marcelo’s gaze, which usually searched for architectural flaws and market values, caught sight of movement near the fallen sign.
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