Page 8 of Shattered Hearts

Mama looks up at the ceiling as if the answer to her youngest grandchild's name is written somewhere above the light fitting.

"I remember them. Raquel, Pablo and, and..."

The youngest. Miguel, she always forgets their names, and there are only three of them. What’s going to happen when both Blanca and I have kids?

"Imagine if there were more grandchildren then we would really be in trouble," I say, and she shoots me a look that pretends to be offended but isn't quite.

"Can we order and just concentrate on what happened today?" Dad says.

He doesn't raise his voice. He never raises his voice. He just shifts slightly in his chair and the entire table realigns itself without anyone acknowledging that it has. Tall and silver haired and still, after everything, the kind of man a room organizes itself around. He learned it in courtrooms and brought it home and none of us have ever quite worked out whether that was intentional.

“What really happened today?” I ask.

Blanca’s had stretches to hold mine, but Mom's eyes cut away from mine the moment I look at her and that tells me everything I had already half suspected sitting in that courtroom.

She's part of this.

I don't say it. I pick up my water glass and drink and look at the faded coastline on the menu and remind myself that I’m twenty-five, and I have just cut my hair and I survived this morning, which is more than I thought I could do at three in the morning last night lying on the cabin floor in Toledo listening to the olive trees move.

Raul comes back and Dad orders for the table the way he always has, pointing down the menu with a quiet authority that Raul has never once questioned. Chopirones. Arroz negro. Grilled sea bass for Cecilia who doesn't eat shellfish. Caldo gallego because Mama will never come here and not have it and the pork ribs for my brothers who look up from their phones just long enough to confirm with a nod that yes, that is what they want, and then look back down again.

This is what happens when you raise boys and expect nothing from them. A father who expresses disappointment in a single syllable and a mother who immediately tells them to ignore him. They grew up understanding that showing up was enough. They came to the courthouse this morning because they knew there would be lunch afterward, in a restaurant where they wouldn't need to reach for their wallets. Not because they're cruel. Just because nobody ever asked more of them than that.

I press my fingers around Blanca’s hand, and we stay like that while the bread arrives and the wine is poured and Dad talks to Raul about the caldo the way he always does, checking the ingredients as if this time they might have changed something.

The chopirones arrive in a shallow dish, glossy and dark, the squid tender under the char and smelling of the sea and something slightly smoky underneath. I eat three before anyone else has picked up a fork and I don't apologize for it. The arroz negro comes out steaming, the rice black from the ink, rich and deep with the kind of flavor that takes a whole morning to build. I eat it without sharing and I don't feel guilty about that either.

Thirty days in Cádiz.

It sits in the back of my head while I eat, the way an unwanted song does.

That house.

"Hopefully it won't even take thirty days," Mama says, reaching for the bread with one hand and her wine glass with the other. “For you to come to your senses."

The table goes quiet in a specific way. The kind where everyone has heard it but nobody moves first.

"Come to my senses," I say.

Not a question. Just the words, put back in the room where she left them.

"You know what I mean, Elena."

"I do. I'm just not sure you do."

Cecilia picks up her fork and concentrates on her sea bass.

"So seeing as Elena won't be in Toledo," one of my brothers says, not looking up from his phone, "can we use the cabin?"

My home for the past year. The cabin where I sat on the floor at three in the morning last night telling myself I was ready for today. That cabin.

"No," Dad says, without any pause at all.

Mama catches my brother's eye across the table and tips her head in the smallest possible movement that unmistakably means yes, she'll sort it. My brother goes back to his phone satisfied. The other one is already nodding as if the same silent communication has reached him too.

I see it. Blanca sees it. Cecilia's fork pauses for exactly one second and then continues.

"Mama," Blanca says, her voice even and precise the way it gets when she's making a point she has no intention of losing. "Elena has been living there. It's not a holiday home right now. It's her home."