Chapter 7: Supervised

The county's supervised visitation room had a rug with cartoon animals, a two-way mirror, and a woman with a clipboard.

Camila was seventeen days old.

Rodrigo came in at ten sharp, alone, in jeans I had never seen him wear.

He held a paper bag in both hands.

"Mrs. Aldama," the monitor said to me. "You can wait outside or sit by the wall. He gets an hour."

I sat by the wall.

In my bag was a folder with everything I owned that said Tejeda on it.

There was a death certificate, a funeral receipt and one photograph.

Soledad's voice from the courthouse corridor had not left my ears since. Your father left you nothing.

Emiliano wanted every page of that folder in his office the next morning, and I did not know what he hoped to find.

Rodrigo stood over the baby seat and did not know where to put his hands.

"Can I?" he asked the monitor.

"She's yours, sir. Support her head."

He lifted Camila out with both hands, stiff and slow.

Her face crumpled.

She wailed so loudly that the woman with the clipboard winced.

"I'm sorry," Rodrigo said to her. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

He bounced her wrong, too fast, and she screamed louder.

I stayed where I was.

It cost me something to stay.

It was her father, and he had no idea how to hold her, and I had spent thirty-one months watching him not notice what I needed.

"Slower," I said at last, from the wall. "Hand under her back. She likes it when you hum."

He looked at me over her head.

Then he slowed down, and the hand went under her back, and he hummed something off-key from his own childhood.

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