Leandra, twelve and old enough to sense the real shape of things, went quiet and careful and started doing dishes without being asked, as if good behavior were a currency that could buy her father back.

Noelia got angry — at me, at the baby, at Romina’s house with its wrong smells and unfamiliar beds — and I let her, because her anger was cleaner than my own and at least she was allowed to feel it out loud.

Belen, my worrier, unfolded and refolded that welcome banner a hundred times, the banner they’d made for a brother who had come home to nowhere.

And Anita, too young for any of it, simply attached herself to my leg and would not be pried off, as though she had decided that if she held on tightly enough the family could not come apart around her.

That was the thing that steadied me, in the end — not rage at Matthias, though I had plenty, but the four faces looking up at me for a signal about whether the world was still safe.

Because I understood that they were reading me, exactly as they had read the house for eight years, and that whatever I did now would become part of what they carried.