Fabian stayed in our lives — not as a ghost from the back of a chapel, but as an uncle to my children, out loud, at the table, at the holidays, slowly building with Matthias the honest brotherhood their father had stolen from both of them.

I watched the two of them learn to be brothers in their forties, clumsily, with decades to make up, and it was one of the few clean and good things to come out of all of it.

The girls changed in ways that took me a while to notice, because healing is quieter than harm.

Leandra stopped doing dishes like a hostage buying her freedom and started leaving them in the sink like an ordinary preteen, which I welcomed as the sign of safety it was.

Noelia’s anger burned down to something manageable and then, mostly, out.

Belen stopped folding things.