When they left, the house did not feel peaceful immediately. People think rescue feels like music. It doesn’t. Sometimes it feels like wet sleeves, broken china, and a woman standing barefoot in a kitchen trying to believe she’s allowed to breathe.

I closed the window. The room warmed slowly.

Salgado asked Valeria if she wanted to make formal reports for the missing items, the transfers, and the recorded incidents. She looked at me. I did not answer for her.

That mattered. After everything that had happened, I would not become another voice deciding her life.

Valeria swallowed. “Yes,” she said. “But not tonight.”

Salgado nodded. “Tomorrow, then.”