Sofia, eight, sat on the porch steps beside my mother, learning to weave beach grass into little crafts and laughing — the easy, whole laugh I hadn’t heard from her in the last year of that marriage, the laugh of a child who is not braced for anything.

I stood at the porch rail with a cup of coffee and watched my mother lean her gray head toward my daughter’s dark one, the two of them absorbed in a craft that would fall apart by evening and didn’t matter in the slightest, and I thought: this is the table.

This was always the table.

I just spent twelve years seated at the wrong one, trying to earn a place I already had somewhere better.

My phone buzzed — a note forwarded through Lindsay’s attorney. Camilo, please.

It’s been a year.