He looks at you over his glasses.
“If you had found them tomorrow, you’d have been burying both.”
You nod once because anything more might break something inside you that is already cracked.
The woman stays unconscious for two more days. The baby begins to rally first, as if spite alone is enough to keep her tethered to the earth. She opens her eyes on the second afternoon and stares at you with a solemn, ancient expression that does not belong on a child that small. You feed her with a bottle Tomás brings from town, and when she grips your finger with that tiny hand, you feel a sensation so sharp it almost scares you.
Hope, after too much mourning, feels a little like pain.
On the third day, the woman wakes screaming.
You rush to the room and find her pressed against the wall, eyes wild, one arm curved protectively around empty air because she thinks her baby is gone. It takes several long, terrible seconds to calm her enough for you to put the child in her arms. The minute she sees the little girl alive, the sound that comes out of her is not relief exactly. It is grief colliding with gratitude so violently that it leaves her shaking all over.
“My baby,” she keeps whispering. “My baby, my baby.”
You step back and give her room, but she does not take her eyes off you for long. Fear stays in them even after recognition arrives. You understand it immediately. A man is a man, and whatever men have done to her recently has made your voice, your size, your presence into threats before you even speak.
So you sit in the doorway, hands visible, and tell her your name.
“You’re safe here,” you say. “No one’s taking either of you anywhere.”
She studies you as if measuring whether those words belong to a liar.
Her name, when it finally comes, is Lucía. The baby is Rosa. She says the names like they might be all she has left in the world, and from the look of things, they just might be.
