Chapter 4: Alone

Marta left on a Sunday.

She had stayed for five days — sleeping on the sofa, making coffee Elena didn’t drink, sitting beside her through the long silences that had taken over the flat. She had held her when she finally cried, really cried, on the third night, when the shock wore off enough for the grief to come through. She hadn’t asked too many questions. That was what Elena loved most about her — she knew when to talk and when to be there.

But Marta had a life in Madrid—a job, a flat, a world that couldn’t be put on hold indefinitely. So on Sunday morning, she packed her bag, held Elena’s face in both hands, and made her promise to call every day.

“You’re stronger than you think,” she said at the door.

Elena nodded. She didn’t believe it yet. But she filed it away for later, for the moments when she would need something to hold onto.

Then the door closed, and the flat was silent again.

She was six months pregnant by then. The bump was visible now, undeniable, a physical fact that she could no longer process in the abstract. A person was growing inside her. A person who would need things — warmth, food, safety, love — and she was the only one who would be there to provide them. Carlos was twenty years old. Twenty years of grey walls and visiting hours and phone calls that cost money, she was already starting to worry about.

She sat down at the kitchen table and looked at the numbers.

The savings would last a few months. After that, she would need to work. She had left her job at the administrative office three years ago when Carlos insisted she didn’t need to — that he earned enough for both of them, that she should rest, that they would start their family soon, and she would be busy enough. She had believed him. She had been grateful. Now she understood that what he had really been doing was making her dependent. Whether he had meant to or not, the result was the same.

She was alone, pregnant, with no income, and a husband in prison.

She called her mother that evening. The conversation was short and painful. Her mother had never fully approved of Carlos — too secretive, she had always said, too many absences, too much money for a truck driver. Elena had defended him every time. Now she sat on the phone and listened to the silence on the other end that said I told you so without using any of those words.

Her mother offered to come. Elena said no. She didn’t want to be managed. She didn’t want someone else’s grief on top of her own.

She wanted to figure out how to stand up on her own.

The baby arrived six weeks later, in the early hours of a Tuesday morning, in a hospital room where the only person holding her hand was a midwife she had never met before. She had called Marta, but Madrid was far, and the labor was fast, and in the end it was just Elena and the pain, and then, suddenly, a sound that cut through everything else.

A cry. Small and furious and absolutely alive.

They placed him on her chest, and she looked down at him — this tiny, red-faced, fist-clenching person who had no idea what world he had been born into — and she felt something move through her that she hadn’t felt in months.

Not happiness, exactly. Not yet. But something close to it. Something that felt like the first breath after a long time underwater.

She named him Paul.

She looked at his face for a long time, searching for something familiar, something of Carlos in the set of his jaw or the shape of his eyes. She found it, or thought she did, and held on to it. She needed him to be Carlos’s. She needed that to be true.

Outside the window, Zaragoza was waking up. The city didn’t care. The city never did.

But in that room, in that bed, with that small warm weight on her chest, Elena made a silent promise. Whatever she had to do, however hard it got, she would keep him safe.

She didn’t know yet how many ways she would fail to keep that promise.