She returned to the corridor, to the door, to the room, and sank onto the edge of the white bed, hands pressed flat against her stomach, breathing slowly through her nose until the narrowing at the edges of her vision began to retreat.
The crying had stopped.
She didn't want to know why.
She sat in the silence of its absence, and the understanding came with a clarity that no argument could disrupt. This house operated by its own grammar, a language she now spoke unwillingly, a world she had crossed into without negotiation. The cheerful young man's giggle, the marble floor, and Santiago Torres Mendoza's cold reception of death earlier, they all belonged to the same lexicon.
She had known it abstractly, growing up in a town with men like Toni Reyes. She had understood the rules at a distance. But distance was gone.
Now she was inside it.
Inside its grammar. Sleeping in one of its rooms, dependent on one of its most fluent speakers for her survival, and her child's.
