So, she didn’t report our call as she said she would.
It pleases me. More than it should.
A lot more.
“Edible,” she says, neutral.
“That’s it?” I murmur, too quiet for the camera. “Edible?”
“Fine,” she says after a beat, conceding an inch. “It was good.”
“If it’s your mamma’s,” I murmur, “why don’t you know it? Didn’t she teach you?”
The change in her face is small and subtle. But I know it immediately. Something tightens around her eyes, then smooths out just as quickly.
I wish I could take the question back. I don’t. I need the answer. I don’t know why, only that I do.
“She tried,” Elena says, voice even. “I was busy being a teenager. Friends. Boys. I thought there’d be more time.”
“How old were you when—”
“Fifteen,” she says. “It was fast.”
I feel it sit heavily on my chest, the way grief always does. The room we’re in is still ugly and carpeted, impersonal, but for just a second, she’s just a girl missing her mother.
It makes me think of Carlotta and my own children. How Lucia wasn’t there when her mother left.
How we’d never get another chance.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and I mean it in a way I don’t often.
Her eyes come up to me like she’s checking for mockery. She doesn’t find any. She nods once, and that’s all.
She turns a page in the file she isn’t reading. I shift in the chair. The strap settles warm against my ankle. We’re closer than we should be—her hip almost in line with my knee, where she leans against the table’s corner. If I moved my hand three inches, I could touch the fabric at her wrist.
She glances at the gap in the door, the green camera blink, then back down at the table. The hall is still silent as it’s too early for even the early risers.
But still, in this room, it feels like a little pocket that’s just ours.
“You want to know something stupid?” she says, so soft it might not be for me.
“Yes.”
“I kept hearing her voice.” Her thumb taps the folder’s edge, once. “That line about the dough feeling like an earlobe. I wanted to tell her it was a terrible unit of measure. I wished so hard for her to be there, just so I could tell her that it makes no sense.”
“Would she have laughed or gotten angry?” I murmur.
“She would’ve laughed,” Elena says. “She had a great laugh. Big and contagious. You couldn’t be mad at her when she laughed.”
The quick breath she takes says it’s too much right now. She looks away, just a flick, then back.
“Don’t do that,” she says.
“Do what?”
“Be… kind.” It sounds like she’s forcing the words out. “It complicates things.”
I could tell her I don’t do kind. It would be a lie. I did it once, all the way to the end. The ache of that is a familiar weight I carry like a watch.
