The question cuts deeper than any doctor ever did.
Nobody moves.
Nobody rescues you from it. Not Rosa. Not Carmen. Not the walls. It just hangs there in your office, absurdly pure, impossible to evade. You built a multi-billion-peso empire because you hated helplessness. You turned every room under your control into a machine because tenderness looked too much like weakness after your wife died and your body failed and the newspapers started talking about succession before your legs were even cold.
And a three-year-old child, with flour on her socks and a busted stuffed rabbit in her hand, sees through all of it in one sentence.
“Yes,” you tell her.
It is the most honest answer you have given anyone in years.
She nods, as if that explains everything.
Then, with the fear not yet fully gone from her little body, she wriggles out of Carmen’s arms, walks carefully back toward your chair, and places the rabbit in your lap. It sits there, bent ear and all, absurd and devastating against the dark wool blanket over your knees.
“Paco helps,” she says.
Rosa cries first.
Carmen not long after. Quietly, one hand over her mouth, the other covering her daughter’s shoulder like she still can’t believe this happened inside the same house where she scrubbed floors and memorized rules about silence. You do not cry. Not because you do not want to. Because the shock is still holding you together by force.
You look down at the rabbit in your lap and understand, with a clarity that makes you sick, that no one has placed anything into your hands in two years except medicine, documents, and pity.
A child just gave you comfort without asking what you were worth first.
By noon, your doctor arrives.
