Amparo did none of these.

She looked at the opening and understood in an instant that the danger was not only the hand but the wall — that if the passage closed, whatever was behind it would be sealed back into secrecy and they would be left, once again, doubting their own senses in the morning.

So she wedged the bench, and by wedging it she kept the dark from swallowing the truth back down.

Inmaculada, hauling on the arm of a weeping woman while a shadow hauled the other way, registered even in that moment that the young sister everyone had been treating as a fragile invalid had just done the coolest-headed thing in the room.