Nobody prepares you for it.

It is not frightening because she was distressed; she was perfectly calm and pleased to see me, over and over, like a door that does not latch.

By about one in the morning it started holding.

And at about twenty past one, with her hand in mine and the lights down, my daughter said: “I’m sorry.”

And I said, “What for, mija?”

And Daniela said — and this is the sentence that moved me off my chair and into eleven months of this — she said: