The towel slid to the floor.
“Mama,” Emma said, “this is the man from the poster.”
The woman’s hand tightened on the doorframe until her knuckles went white.
From inside the house, a voice called, “Rosa? Who is it?”
Alessandro went cold.
He knew that voice.
He knew it from morning light on white sheets. From arguments in the kitchen. From whispers at two in the morning when the house was quiet enough for both of them to admit fear. From the last message she had left one year ago, which he had played until the file corrupted and his phone refused to open it again.
Footsteps crossed old floorboards.
A woman appeared behind Rosa, wiping flour from her hands onto a gray sweater.
Elena.
His wife.
Her hair was tied low at the nape of her neck, the way she wore it when she baked bread on Sunday mornings because it kept falling into the dough. There was flour on her wrist. A plain gold wedding ring hung on a thin chain around her neck instead of her finger.
She saw him.
The wooden spoon in her hand hit the floor with a hollow clatter.
Six years of marriage.
One year of silence.
All of it stood between them in that narrow doorway.
Then a small head peeked from behind her legs.
Dark curls. Brown eyes. One hand gripping the torn ear of a gray stuffed elephant.
Mateo.
The boy looked at Alessandro the way a child looks at a face in an old photograph—known and impossible at the same time.
