“You can’t keep doing this,” the unfamiliar voice says. “She has a right to know.”
Then Adrián, low and urgent. “Not tonight.”
“Then when?”
A second of silence passes, followed by Teresa’s voice, brittle and irritated. “Lower your voice. If she hears, everything falls apart.”
You stop breathing.
Everything falls apart.
There are certain phrases that sound ordinary until fear touches them. Then they become levers, prying open every quiet suspicion you have buried out of loyalty, embarrassment, or love. You edge closer to the door, careful not to let the floorboards speak for you. Rain pounds the roof. Somewhere outside, a branch cracks in the wind.
Then lightning flashes again, and through the narrow gap of the half-open door, you see enough to turn your bones to ice.
There is a man sitting in the chair by Teresa’s bed.
Not a visitor in a raincoat. Not a doctor. A man in a faded gray shirt and black sweatpants, thin almost to the point of illness, his face hollow but sharply familiar in a way that makes your stomach drop. For one impossible second your mind refuses to assemble what your eyes are seeing. Then the pieces lock together, and the world tilts beneath you.
