to his own surprise, grief.

Because no matter how angry he was, there had once been a woman who laughed in grocery store aisles and sang off-key in the car and held newborn Santiago against her shoulder like she was cradling the whole world.

Hearing what she had become felt like attending a funeral for someone who was still alive.

Two days later, Leticia was medically cleared and brought to the hospital under police supervision for an interview and a supervised chance to see the children, if the doctors and social worker agreed.

Tomás almost refused.

Elena persuaded him to allow a brief, controlled meeting with only Santiago present first.

“The children need truth appropriate to their age,” she said.

“Not chaos.

Not revenge.

Truth.”

When Leticia entered the consultation room, she looked like a faded version of herself.

Her hair was unwashed.

Her eyes were ringed dark and hollow.

Shame clung to her more visibly than the hospital bracelet still fastened at her wrist.

She looked at Tomás and began crying before she spoke.

“I was coming back,” she said.

He stared at her.

“Three days later?”

“I didn’t mean…” She pressed both hands to her face.

“Oscar said he’d help me get money.

I was behind on everything.

The rent, the power, the school trip, all of it.

I was embarrassed.

I didn’t want you to know.

He said he knew people, that we could fix it in one night.

Then I took pills because I couldn’t calm down, and everything got blurry.

My phone died.

I woke up, and I knew what I’d done, and I couldn’t make myself face it.

Then I took more because I couldn’t stop panicking.”

Tomás heard every word.

He believed some of them.

That made it worse, not better.

“They thought you were dead,” he said quietly.

“Your son tried to keep your daughter alive with water from a cup.”

Leticia made a sound that did not quite reach the level of a scream.

She folded forward and sobbed into her hands.

The law moved quickly after that.

Emergency custody was granted to Tomás that same week.

Leticia was charged with child endangerment and abandonment, though her attorney later negotiated court-supervised treatment conditions that emphasized rehabilitation because there had been no prior criminal record and because psychiatric evaluations showed severe depressive disorder complicated by substance misuse.

She was ordered into inpatient treatment, parenting classes, and supervised visitation only after medical professionals deemed it appropriate.

Tomás expected to feel victorious when the judge signed the temporary order.

He didn’t.

He felt sick.

Because papers could not erase the image of Santiago alone on the floor or Alma burning with fever on that couch.

He moved the children into his penthouse for exactly nine days before realizing it was the wrong place.

It had glass walls, sharp corners, expensive silence, and no room for the kind of healing that needed crayons on tables and bedtime stories said twice because the first telling hadn’t chased the fear away.

On the tenth day, he leased a warm two-story house with a small backyard ten minutes from Santiago’s school and twenty from the hospital.

He delegated three major accounts to his chief operating officer, canceled an expansion trip to Phoenix, and told his board he would