Because no one else in that house had ever looked at you with enough tenderness to preserve a version of you like that.
Your hands shake harder as you set the photograph against the wall of the alley and pull out the next item.
A folded letter.
Not in your ex-husband’s handwriting. Not in your mother-in-law’s. You know both too well. This one is older, slower, written in the careful block script of a man who spent much of his life speaking less than he felt.
Don Ernesto.
For a second, the alley around you disappears.
The music from the restaurant on the corner turns thin and far away. The jacarandá blossoms at your feet might as well belong to another world. There is only your pulse, the brown envelope, and the terrible possibility that after five years of coldness, somebody in that house actually saw what happened to you.
You unfold the letter.
María,
