"I want you to bathe her in our tub.

I didn't sleep that night.

I sat in the armchair beside the guest suite door and listened to the quiet of the house until the sky outside the window went from black to the flat gray of early morning.

Alejandro had offered to sit with me.

I told him I needed to think.

He brought me a blanket and a cup of tea and left me alone, which was the right thing to do.

At half past six, the door opened.

Lucy stood in the frame in the clean clothes we had found for her — a soft gray cardigan, dark trousers, slippers that were slightly too large.

Her hair had been washed and dried and lay in thin white waves around her face.

Without the grime, without the layers of street and weather, she looked like someone's grandmother.

She looked like someone who had once had a kitchen and a garden and a name people called her by.

She looked at me in the armchair.

"You stayed out here all night," she said.

"I wasn't tired."

She considered that.

"May I sit with you?"

I gestured to the small sofa across from me.

She moved carefully, the way people move when they have learned not to assume they are welcome anywhere.

We sat in silence for a moment.

"Tell me about the dream," I said.

"The child."

She folded her hands in her lap.

"She has dark hair.

She's very small.

She's sitting on a kitchen floor playing with a wooden spoon, and I'm at the stove, and I keep looking back at her to make sure she's still there." She paused.

"I always look back.

Even in the dream, I always look back."

My throat tightened.

"Do you remember anything else?

Anything about where you lived?

A street, a building, a neighbor's name?"

She was quiet for a long time.

"There's a window," she said slowly.

"A kitchen window with yellow curtains.

And outside there's a fire escape with a red pot on it.

I planted something in it.

I don't remember what."

I stood up.

I crossed to the small writing desk in the corner and opened the bottom drawer where I kept the things I had carried from my grandmother's house when she passed.

A rubber-banded bundle of old letters.

A prayer card.

And a photograph — not the one in the locket, a different one, larger, slightly water-damaged at one corner.

A kitchen.

Yellow curtains.

A young woman standing at a stove, laughing at whoever was holding the camera.

On the fire escape outside the window, barely visible: a red clay pot.

I walked back and held the photograph out to Lucy.

She took it in both hands.

For a long moment she didn't move.

Her eyes traveled across every inch of it.

Her breathing changed — slower, then faster, then very slow again.

"That's my stove," she said.

Her voice was barely sound.

"That's my window."

"Yes," I said.

Her hands were trembling.

"That's me."

"Yes."

She pressed the photograph against her chest and closed her eyes.

A sound came out of her that I had no word for.

Not crying exactly.

Something that had been sealed for twenty years finally finding a way out.

I sat down beside her on the sofa.

I didn't touch her.

I just stayed close enough that she would know she wasn't alone.

After a while she said, still with her eyes closed, "What was her name?

The little girl."

"Mariana," I said.

She opened her eyes.

She looked at me for a long time.

"Hello, Mariana," she said.

I took her hand.

"Hello, Mama."

We sat like that until the sun came fully through the window and the house began to wake around us.

Neither of us moved.

Neither of us needed to.

Then Alejandro appeared at the top of the stairs, and behind him was a man I didn't recognize — middle-aged, carrying a soft-sided briefcase, with the careful expression of someone who had delivered difficult news before and knew how to do it gently.

Alejandro said, "His name is Dr.

Reyes.

He's a neurologist.

I called him last night." He looked at me.

"With your permission."

I looked at Lucy.

She looked at me.

"Yes," she said.

"I want to know what happened to me."

Dr.