The phone buzzed on his desk. Leo didn't need to look at the caller ID. He knew the rhythm of those buzzes, the specific vibration pattern that meant his father was drunk and feeling expansive.
He let it ring.
It rang again. Then a third time. Then the voicemail notification chimed, and Leo's jaw tightened as the transcription appeared:
"Still hiding from the world like a little girl? Your brother bought a house. Your cousin's son just got accepted to medical school. What do you have? A computer. Congratulations. You're a big success."
Leo deleted the message. Then deleted it again from the trash folder. Then sat with his hands hovering over the keyboard, not typing, just feeling the absence of anything to type.
His father, Martin Vasquez, was a retired construction foreman who had never believed in mental health, remote work, or the internet as anything other than "a way for lazy people to pretend they're doing something." He'd grown up poor in the kind of house where boys became men by breaking things with their hands. Leo had broken nothing. Leo had, instead, discovered a computer in the school library at age eleven and had never fully returned from that other world.
"You're not depressed," his father would say. "You're just a coward."
The word had settled into Leo's bones like a splinter that couldn't be removed. He'd carried it through high school, through the single semester of college he'd managed before the money ran out, through every failed venture and every sleepless night.
Coward.
Maybe it was true. But if it was, Leo had decided, it was also true that cowardice was just another word for the exhaustion of fighting a world that didn't want you.