You cannot answer her.
Your mouth has gone dry. The world keeps moving around you in a blur of engines, hawkers, heat, and footsteps, but inside you something ancient has stood up. Not a memory exactly. Something more dangerous than memory. Recognition.
When you step closer, the woman looks up with the guarded weariness of someone who has been disappointed by strangers too many times to expect mercy from another one.
“¿Cómo se llama usted?” you ask.
Her eyes narrow, not with fear, but confusion. Men in tailored suits do not kneel in the dust to ask beggars their names. Men like you are usually the kind she begs from and loses.
“Rosa,” she says after a pause. “Rosa Delgado.”
The name lands like thunder in a sealed room.
You go pale so fast Camila shifts beside you, her fingers tightening around your sleeve now instead of your hand. Rosa Delgado. The name is not just familiar. It is buried in the oldest, darkest chamber of your childhood, in the part of your mind where broken sounds live without context. A woman’s voice humming near a window. The smell of soap. A shawl hanging on a nail. A hand stroking your hair. Your father shouting from another room. Then silence, the kind that arrives after damage.
You kneel before her fully then, right there on the hot, dirty pavement.
Gasps ripple through the people who have started to gather. Someone whispers your name. Someone else pulls out a phone. A billionaire kneeling before a beggar is the sort of spectacle the world cannot resist. But you do not care about them. Your throat is tightening with the terror of hope.
