Elena smoothed a braid. "I think Aunt Carmen is trying. Trying can be its own kind of beautiful."
Sofia considered this with seven-year-old gravity. "Daddy said trying is what brave people do when they are scared."
"Daddy is right about that," Elena said, and meant it.
That night she told Marco what Sofia had said. He listened. He did not make a speech. He kissed her temple and turned off the reading lamp, and in the dark of their ordinary townhouse they lay awake a little while longer, not because something was wrong, but because something was still becoming right, and becoming deserved to be witnessed.
"Do you ever wish Sofia had not found the bottle?" Marco asked into the dark.
Elena considered the question with the seriousness of someone who had lived inside its consequences. "Sometimes, for a second—when I remember the way my stomach dropped. Then I remember Papa's hand on Sofia's hair. I remember Carmen's one-year chip. I remember us in counseling saying true things out loud. If the bottle had stayed hidden, we might have been quieter. We would not have been better."
"I still replay closing the laptop," Marco said. "The sound of it. Your face."