He nodded once. “Then we finish the route. Then I drive you.”
So you finished.
That, too, was part of the life you built. Even in shock, there was work. Always work. You lifted bags, rode the steps, wiped sweat from your neck, answered a joke one of the older workers made about politicians smelling worse than dumpsters, and let your body keep moving because stillness would have let the past catch up with all of you at once.
By the time you reached the municipal yard, Rodrigo’s face had settled somewhere behind your breastbone like a shard.
At home, the twins crashed into you the way they always did.
Mateo first, all knees and speed and sharp edges, with the same dark eyes Rodrigo had never earned. Valeria half a second after him, fiercer in smaller ways, arms wrapping your waist with a grip that always managed to feel both needy and reassuring. They smelled like sun, crayons, and the cheap strawberry shampoo on sale last week.
“Mamá, look,” Mateo shouted, already waving a worksheet with a gold star. “I got the only ten.”
“I got two tens,” Valeria said instantly, because fairness in your house had the energy of litigation.
You held them both and let your face press into their hair a little too long.
Something in you had gone thin and glassy after seeing Rodrigo, and now the children’s ordinary warmth was the only thing keeping it from shattering entirely. Mateo wriggled back first, suspicious in the way children are when love suddenly feels heavier than usual.
“Why are your eyes weird?” he asked.
You almost smiled.
“Because your teacher sent home spelling homework.”
Valeria narrowed her eyes. “That is not true.”
No, it wasn’t. But then again, six-year-olds have no business carrying the first day their father became a ghost twice. So you kissed their foreheads, told them to wash their hands, and began cutting tomatoes for dinner while your heartbeat still stumbled around inside you like a drunk thing looking for the door.
Doña Lupita came by at six with a bag of tortillas and one look at your face.
She had the extraordinary gift some older women have, seeing devastation the way other people see weather coming. She had seen you after the divorce, after the birth, after the fourth rent increase, after the night Mateo’s fever hit one hundred four and the clinic made you wait two hours while he shook against your chest. She set the tortillas on the counter and said, “He found you.”
It was not a question.
The twins went quiet at the sink.
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