You couldn’t see them yet.”

Chapter 31 — The Slow Road

Recovery was slow, and it was not only the body that had to heal.

Santiago had to learn to eat properly again, to keep his medical appointments, to accept the strange new fact that healing did not mean forgetting.

He began to see a therapist.

For weeks he woke in the night certain he had heard Griselda’s key turning in a lock.

Sometimes, without deciding to, he hid food beneath his pillow — an old reflex from an old hunger that his body had not yet been told was over.