And yet. That look in the kitchen this morning. The rigid way Lucía avoided his eyes. The deliberate flashlight at the door.
Late that afternoon, as I stand on the flat concrete roof hanging damp, heavy sheets along the clothesline, my mother joins me, carrying a faded plastic bucket of clothespins.
“The neighbors are talking again,” she says, her tone dripping with disapproval. “Mrs. Delgado said her daughter claims she saw Lucía sneaking into your room after midnight carrying her own pillow. Twice. Clear as day through the window.”
I force my facial muscles to remain entirely neutral. “And?”
“And people will imagine far worse things if you give them enough silence to work with,” she warns, her eyes searching my face for a crack.
Her words sting sharply because they are undeniably true. In tight-knit neighborhoods like ours, mystery is a lit match dropped carelessly into dry summer grass.
“I’ll handle it,” I say sharply, snapping another clothespin.
My mother stops and studies me intently. “Will you?”
I swallow the jagged truth and say only, “I will.” She nods slowly, though I know she does not believe me.
That evening, Tomás returns home from the warehouse, his clothes smelling of motor oil and sweat. He brings a greasy paper bag filled with sweet pastries. He kisses my mother’s forehead affectionately, calls out a greeting to Esteban, and smiles at Lucía with the distracted, pure affection of a tired husband who implicitly assumes the woman he married is completely safe simply because she is enclosed within his family’s walls.
Watching him chew a pastry, a heavy, suffocating dread settles deep in my stomach. Tomás is the man who still reaches for hope long before he ever reaches for suspicion. If something truly dangerous is living and breathing under his roof, he will be the very last one capable of accepting it.
Dinner passes in a bizarre, hazy blur of ordinary conversation. Through it all, Lucía barely speaks a single word. She serves everyone else first, moving like a ghost. She eats almost nothing and keeps her dark eyes lowered as if the wooden dining table itself might suddenly rise up and accuse her of a crime.
When bedtime finally comes, I feel my pulse thudding a frantic rhythm in my throat.
Lucía appears quietly at my bedroom door, exactly as she always does, clutching her tightly folded blanket and pillow to her chest like armor. Esteban is in the bathroom down the hall. I sit on the very edge of the mattress. Lucía looks at me just once, and that single, terrified glance carries the weight of a desperate question.
Still tonight?
I give a sharp, imperceptible nod.
She steps inside, moves to the bed, and places her pillow exactly in the middle.
By the time the house finally goes dark and quiet, every single nerve ending in my body is straining, listening to the abyss.
At exactly 1:13 a.m., the sound comes again.
