Page 211 of Diego

“It has regional dialects.”

Victoria laughs from the floor, where she is trying to stop Leonardo from climbing onto the coffee table. “Wait until you get to the phase where they use one word for six completely different things and expect you to know which one they mean.”

Leonardo gets one knee onto the table.

Victoria catches him around the waist and puts him back on the rug without interrupting herself. “And then they get outraged when you guess wrong.”

He looks up at her with deep betrayal.

“No climbing the table," she tells him firmly.

He immediately reaches for it again.

I lean back against the sofa and watch Victoria intercept him with the ease of someone who has done this exact thing so many times she no longer has to think about it. She moves his snack bowl farther away from the edge, wipes something sticky from his hand, and hands him a toy before he can redirect his energy toward something more expensive.

None of it is graceful.

There is no polished version of motherhood happening in front of me. Victoria’s hair is starting to come loose around her face. Julia has a damp spot on one sleeve where Cecilia wiped her mouth against it. There are crushed cracker crumbs on the rug, a toy under the coffee table, and a plastic cup sitting beside one of the most expensive pieces of furniture I have ever seen.

It all looks completely normal.

A few weeks ago, I think I would have seen the mess first.

Now I catch myself noticing the rhythm of it.

Julia already knows when Cecilia is getting tired because her movements slow before she gets fussy. Victoria recognizes the exact point when Leonardo is about to throw something and catches the spoon before it leaves his hand. They do not discuss any of it. They just move around their children and anticipate every need

I think of Diego with Leonardo.

The image comes back easily.

Diego on this same sofa with Leonardo climbing all over him, one small hand planted against his face while Diego laughed and let him treat his body like furniture. The way he caught him without looking when Leonardo twisted too far. The way he moved his phone before little fingers could reach it. The way none of it looked like effort.

I had known Diego had been an uncle for most of his adult life.

Seeing it had been different.

Watching Victoria and Julia now makes it harder to treat that moment as something isolated.

This is his family.

This is what he comes from.

Children underfoot. Food appearing before anyone asks. People walking into each other’s houses without ceremony. Someone always holding a baby, feeding a toddler, arguing over who brought too much food, or checking a phone because somebody else in the family has gone into labor.

And, increasingly, this house seems to be part of that.

That thought catches me off guard.

I look around.

The living room still has the same huge windows and expensive furniture it had the first morning I woke here, but it no longer feels like the pristine house Diego bought from people he barely knew.

There are toys on the rug. Leonardo’s cup is on the coffee table. Cecilia has abandoned her rabbit against one of the cushions. Victoria’s bag is open beside the sofa, and one of Julia’s shoes has somehow ended up several feet from the other because Cecilia was playing with them.

There is a bowl on the table that Emilia keeps refilling because people keep eating from it.

My laptop is sitting closed at the end of the sofa, half buried beneath one of the blankets Diego insists I keep nearby.