Cole Anders was born in Port Mercy, Texas, on a strip of land where the air smelled of salt, oil, and something faintly metallic that sat in your throat before you even learned how to name it. People there did not ask what your dreams were. They asked where your father worked. If he worked the refineries, the tankers, the shipyard, the storage yards, then you were a regular kid. If your father wore a hard hat, woke before daylight, and came home smelling of fuel and exhaustion, then your house stood the way many houses in America stand, on pain paid by the hour.