Noelia wanted to know why we weren’t going home.

Belen sat with the welcome sign she had made folded in her lap, smoothing it flat and folding it again.

And little Anita, three years old, kept asking the question that cut deepest because she asked it without any idea of its weight: “Is Daddy mad at the baby?”

I told them Daddy needed some time, which was a coward’s answer and the only one I had that wouldn’t break me in front of them.

But children do not accept “some time” the way adults pretend to; they keep turning it over, looking for the part that will make it make sense.

Over the next days I watched each of my girls try to solve the puzzle in her own way.