Her shoulders drop and she turns back to the tree.
She reaches for another ornament, a small silver star just lying on a branch.
The hook is missing and the ornament falls into her hand.
She looks at it with confusion.
"It won't stay," she says.
I hold out my hand. "Let me see."
She hesitates, then places the star in my palm.
I examine it and see that the hook has broken off completely, so I stand and walk to the sideboard where Marta keeps crafting supplies.
I find a small box of ornament hooks and return to Sofia.
"We can fix it," I say.
I attach a clip to form a new hook to the star and hand it back to her.
She takes it carefully and looks up at me with wide eyes.
"Thank you," she whispers so softly and her eyes go wide in wonder.
"You're welcome."
She turns back to the tree and hangs the star on a low branch where she can reach it.
Then she steps back to admire her work and a small smile crosses her face.
I watch her and feel something swell in my chest.
It isn’t a feeling I'm familiar with.
It's warm and sharp at the same time.
It makes me think of things I haven't thought about in years.
My mother used to watch my brother and me decorate the tree when we were children.
She would sit in the same chair where Angelica is sitting now and smile as we argued over which ornaments went where.
My brother always wanted to put everything at the top.
I wanted them spread evenly across the branches.
We would compromise eventually, but not before our mother laughed at our stubbornness.
My brother's dead now, killed in a territorial dispute when I was sixteen.
My mother died two years later from grief and illness.
My father followed her within the year.
The holidays stopped meaning anything after that.
They became just another day to work through.
