My Children Came Back to the Hospital Pretending to Care but My Bed Was Already Empty

I woke up from the coma on a Tuesday.

That is how Lucía tells it, precisely, the way she tells everything that matters. Not sometime in the morning, not in the early hours. Tuesday, at four forty-seven, because she had been watching the clock on the wall above the door the way people watch clocks when they have nothing left to do but wait and count the seconds between the thing they dread and the thing they are hoping for. She was holding my hand when my fingers moved, and she told the nurse before I had even opened my eyes.