Pueblo is two hours south of Denver on I-25 and I made it in ninety-four minutes.
I know because I watched the clock the way I watch everything — the mile markers falling, the Front Range sliding past on my right, Castle Rock then Monument Hill then the long descent into the Arkansas valley where the mountains pull back and the country opens flat and brown and industrial and stops pretending to be a postcard. This is the Colorado nobody photographs. The steel town. The part of the state that built the rest of it and got nothing for it, and the part of Cole's empire that no amount of Cornice AI polish can aestheticize. My father was somewhere ahead of me in a stranger's car with a nineteen-year-old promissory note in his coat, driving toward a man who'd wanted me since before Cole Ashford bought his markers.
Marcos was in my ear the whole way.
