Chapter 9: The Things Under the Bed
Sofia's box was a shoebox — pale blue, with a lid that had been taped shut and then carefully reopened so many times that the tape had lost most of its grip and simply rested across the top now, more symbol than seal.
She carried it out from under her bed with both arms, the way children carry things they consider precious, and set it on the floor between herself and her father.
"I found some of them in her studio," she said.
"Before it got cleared out.
Dolores helped me.
She didn't tell anyone."
Mateo looked at Dolores, who was standing in the doorway of Sofia's room.
Dolores met his eyes and said nothing.
He nodded once.
Sofia lifted the lid.
Inside: a small photograph, printed on regular paper — Elena in the garden, laughing at something outside the frame, her hair loose, one hand raised against the sun.
A tube of hand cream, nearly empty, the label worn soft.
A folded piece of paper in Elena's handwriting that said only *for when you miss me* across the front and, when Mateo carefully unfolded it with Sofia's permission, contained a list of seventeen small things — Sofia's favorite color, the song she liked at bedtime, the way she took her hot chocolate, the jokes that made her laugh the hardest — written in the careful, deliberate hand of a woman who had known she was running out of time and had tried to leave a map.
Mateo held the paper for a long time.
"Did you read this?" he asked Sofia.
"Some of it," she said.
"The words are hard in some parts."
"Do you want me to read it to you?"
She thought about it.
"Not yet." She took the paper back gently and folded it along its original creases.
"Maybe when I'm bigger."
He watched her place it back in the box with the photograph and the hand cream, smooth the lid down, press the tape back into place.
"Daddy," she said, not looking up, "is she gone?
Renata?"
"Yes."
"Is she coming back?"
"No."
Sofia pressed the last corner of tape down carefully.
"Okay," she said.
Just that.
Okay.
The word of a child who had been waiting for a door to close and had finally heard it.
She picked up the picture book from her pillow and held it out to him.
"Will you read it to me?
The whole thing?"
He took it from her hands.
It was a simple book — the kind with more pictures than words, the kind that takes ten minutes to read aloud and a lifetime to forget.
The spine was soft with use.
Several pages had small pencil marks in the margins where Elena had written tiny notes to herself about how Sofia reacted to certain parts — a smiley face beside the page with the rabbit, a small star beside the last page.
He opened to the first page.
Dolores quietly pulled the door to Sofia's room halfway closed and went back down the hall.
In the kitchen she put the kettle on and stood at the counter and looked out the window at the garden, where the afternoon light was doing what it always did at that hour — slanting low, catching dust, making ordinary things look briefly like something more.
She could hear Mateo's voice from down the hall.
Low, steady, reading.
May you like
She did not cry.
She simply stood there and listened to the sound of that house beginning, very slowly, to breathe again.
