There was the autumn Carlos returned the silver watch.
He had kept it in a locked drawer for almost a year, unable to throw it away and unable to look at it. One Saturday he drove to the foundation offices during closed hours and left the watch, cleaned and inside a padded envelope with no note, with a security desk attendant who promised to place it in lost and found. On the drive home he felt ridiculous and relieved and slightly sick. When he told Amara, she went still at the sink, hands wet, terracotta top darkening where water sprayed.
"Why now?" she asked.
"Because keeping it was letting him keep a room in our house," Carlos said. Medium tan hands on the counter edge, gold band dull from dish soap earlier. "I don't want him archived here. Not even as evidence. The evidence already lived in us. The metal can go."
Amara dried her hands and touched his wrist — the place where his own watch usually sat, scratched underside and all. "Thank you for not making me do it. I don't think I could have touched it without becoming small again."
"You're not small," Carlos said. "You were wrong. Wrong and small aren't synonyms."
There was the winter of Amara's father's funeral, when grief rearranged the furniture of every other emotion.
Amara's father had been a quiet man who fixed radios and believed in showing love through repaired objects. At the service, Carlos stood beside Amara with Sophia and Julian in dark clothes that made them look like miniature adults, and he held Amara's hand through eulogies that made her shake. Later, at the house of mourning filled with aluminum trays and cousins, Amara whispered to Carlos in the hallway, "He never knew. About Nathan. I think that is mercy. I also think I robbed him of the chance to be angry on your behalf, and I don't know what to do with that."