a last name then.

By midnight, he had one.

Oscar Mena.

Thirty-eight.

Minor gambling charges.

Two prior arrests for driving under the influence.

No convictions for violence, but a long trail of unpaid debts and short-lived jobs.

He and Leticia had known each other before Tomás.

The thought of that man anywhere near his children filled Tomás with a fury so sharp it made him cold.

At two in the morning, Alma woke.

Tomás had been sitting beside her hospital bed, still in the wrinkled shirt from work, when her fingers moved against the blanket.

He stood so fast the chair tipped backward.

“Alma?”

Her eyes fluttered open.

They were glassy and confused, but open.

She looked at the tubes in her hand, then at him.

“Daddy?”

He bent over the bed, laughing and crying at the same time in a way he would have thought impossible a day earlier.

“Yeah, baby.

I’m here.”

“Juice,” she whispered.

A nurse smiled from the doorway.

“That’s the best word in the world right now.”

Santiago was brought in a few minutes later, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

When he saw Alma looking back at him, he ran to the bedside and stopped only because Tomás caught him before he could jostle the IV.

“She’s awake,” he said, as if he were announcing a miracle to the room.

“She is,” Tomás answered.

Santiago put one small hand on Alma’s blanket and began to cry silently, with relief rather than fear this time.

The next day, after both children had eaten real food and rested, Elena the social worker asked Santiago gentle questions while Tomás sat nearby.

Children tell the truth in fragments.

Santiago said Mommy had been sleeping a lot lately, then being very awake all at once.

Sometimes she forgot dinner and gave him crackers with peanut butter instead.

Friday she told them she was going out to get groceries and would be back before dark.

She made him promise to watch Alma and said cartoons were allowed until she returned.

When the sun went down and she was still gone, he called her phone from the house phone, but the battery was dead.

On Saturday he found two apples and split them with Alma.

On Sunday he gave her water because she felt hot.

On Monday morning she would not wake up, and he went next door, but the neighbor wasn’t home, so he crossed the street to an older man who let him use his phone.

“Why didn’t you call me sooner?” Tomás asked later, hating himself as soon as the words left his mouth.

Santiago looked stricken.

“Mommy said not to bother you when you were working.”

Tomás closed his eyes.

There it was.

Not a knife, not a wound, but something that still bled.

By late afternoon the police found Leticia.

She was in a budget motel forty minutes away, registered under her own name.

Oscar Mena was gone by the time officers arrived.

Leticia was alone, disoriented, her phone dead on the nightstand, a half-finished bottle of prescription sedatives beside an empty glass that smelled faintly of alcohol.

She had not been kidnapped.

She had not been lying injured in a ditch.

She had left.

When Detective Marín told him, Tomás felt fury first.

Then disgust.

Then,