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He sat down on Dad’s enormous recliner. He bowed down and rubbed both hands over his short, military-style buzz-cut.
“He did this to her,” he said, but it wasn’t a question.
“Yeah.”
“His name.”
“I can’t do that.”
“His name, Carolina.”
“I can’t. Ramiro, don’t do anything stupid.”
“You want us to all continue to be family . . . even after everything? Families talk, don’t they? I want a name.”
I sighed. He’d get it out of me, or he’d get it out of Sara, and I couldn’t have him go upstairs and try to intimidate her right now.
“Fine. His name is Brian.”
“Brian what?”
I shrugged. “I never knew his last name.”
“Where does he work?”
“Ramiro—don’t. Don’t go there.”
“Where?” he hissed.
I sighed. “I don’t know that he has a real steady job. He sounds like a bit of a deadbeat, but I remember her saying something about him doing maintenance work at an apartment building near the hospital. That’s all I know.”
He sprang up from the chair and left before I could protest again.
The next day,I went to Dad’s to check in on Sara. She was still in my old room, and I knocked softly on the door in case she was sleeping.
“Come in,” she said.
She smiled up at me as I walked in. She had removed the bandage from her nose, so the wreckage of her body was exemplified by her face. My jaw clenched at the sight of the deep purple and green nebulas stretching over her nose from cheek to cheek.
“Hi. How are you doing?”
“I’m good,” she said, though her words were garbled by something in her mouth. She swallowed the bite. “The splint is super itchy. It’ssotempting to shove a pencil in there and scratch.”
“You know that’s a bad idea.”
Sara sighed. “I know.”
“What are you eating?”
She pulled a box from the other side of the bed and offered it to me like a platter. “You want one?”
I looked down at the box filled with artisan chocolates painted so beautifully it seemed a sin to eat them. “Those are gorgeous,” I said.
“I know,” said Sara. “I stopped myself from eating them as long as I could. But you know—chocolate.”
“That was nice of Ramiro,” I said.
Sara cocked her head to the side. “Ramiro didn’t bring these.”
