"Sofia likes dinosaurs and also glitter," Elena told her father, because those were the true things she could offer immediately. "She wore my cardigan last night and asked if she smelled pretty. She is six and already negotiating."
Ricardo laughed, a thin sound that cost him. "Like her mother. Always negotiating."
They stayed an hour. Elena watched Carmen adjust Papa's pillow with a tenderness that did not erase the past and did not need to. She watched Marco fetch water without being asked. She felt the strange geography of a family rearranging itself under fluorescent lights while Pennsylvania traffic moved indifferently beyond the glass.
In the hallway afterward, while Carmen spoke with a nurse about medication schedules, Elena stood beside Marco near a vending machine that hummed like a tired insect. She watched his profile—the short black hair, the familiar slope of his shoulder—and felt the double exposure of love and grievance.
"How many times?" she asked.
"Six drives," he said. "Seven if you count the night she called from the hospital parking lot because the bus had stopped running and she was crying too hard to think."
"You went."