You almost smile.
Children are ruthless little witnesses, and honesty lives in them long before politeness. You smooth her hair and tell her your throat hurts, that the hospital air felt strange and dry, and she accepts it because she is three and because children in violent homes learn to accept incomplete answers if they sound gentle enough.
From the hallway, a woman’s voice cuts in sharp as broken glass.
“Are you planning to stand outside all day?”
That will be Teresa, Damián’s mother.
She sits at the dining table wearing a housedress, red lipstick, and the expression of someone personally offended by the existence of other women. Beside her is Damián’s sister, Verónica, scrolling through her phone with the lazy cruelty of people who outsource the dirtiest work to the strongest bully in the room and then enjoy the leftovers.
Teresa looks you up and down.
“So,” she says, “His Majesty the madonna returns.” She means the hospital visit, not with concern, but with accusation. As if Lidia taking one afternoon to see her twin was a luxury stolen from more deserving people.
You lower your eyes the way Lidia would.
That costs you something. Everything in you wants to look directly at her until she remembers every ugly word she ever used against your yaas sister and hears it back in the shape of your silence. But not yet. Monsters grow careless when they believe they are still looking at prey.
“Sofi needs dinner,” you say softly.
Teresa snorts.
“Then cook.”
The kitchen is a narrow corridor pretending to be a room.
A dented refrigerator, one sticky window, a sink with chipped enamel, and an old stove with only three reliable burners. You open the cabinets and feel rage rise like heat under a closed lid. Barely any food. Pasta, oil, stale crackers, rice. In the corner, hidden behind tea tins, you find two fruit cups and a packet of animal crackers wrapped carefully in a dish towel.
Lidia’s stash for Sofi.
You make rice, eggs, and whatever vegetables are still decent enough to cut. Sofi sits at the table watching you with solemn concentration while Teresa complains from the other room that you take too long and waste too much. Verónica wanders in only to ask whether Damián knows you were at “the asylum” longer than expected, then smiles when she says the word.
You say almost nothing.
Silence is easier for them to misread than argument. They take your quiet for weakness, exactly as cruel people always do. By the time the front door slams open an hour later and Damián walks in smelling like alcohol, cheap cologne, and entitlement, the house has already given you more information than any confession could have.
He is taller than you pictured.
