Chapter 4: The Bolt on the Door

"Ignacio, you're tired," Renata said, and she was already moving.

She took the handles of his wheelchair and pulled it back from the table.

"Nurse," she called. "Nurse, please."

A woman in blue scrubs hurried in from the hall.

My father's hand did not leave my wrist.

"Let go, darling," Renata said sweetly. "You're hurting Dalia."

He wasn't, and everyone at the table knew it.

His grip tightened a little more.

His eyes moved to the tablet in his lap, and then back to me.

I understood him.

I slid my free hand under the blanket and thumbed the screen awake.

He had typed four lines with one finger, and he had typed them slowly, probably over many days.

PILAR BOX.

BANK. KEY IN SAFE.

SHE TOLD ME RAN AWAY.

NEVER BELIEVED.

I read it once.

Then I pulled the blanket back over the tablet and put my hand on top of his.

"I know, Papa," I whispered.

Tears ran down the sagging side of his face and he did not wipe them.

The nurse pried his fingers off my wrist one at a time.

Renata wheeled him out without looking at me.

At the door she turned her head and said, to the room, "He gets overstimulated. It's a medical condition."

Then she was gone, and the clock in the hall was loud again.

The board members stood up so fast that one of them knocked his chair back.

"Renata will be in touch," he said to nobody, and they both left.

The doctor closed her leather folder with the pen still inside.

She did not meet my eye on the way to the door.

That left Tomas and me and a table full of cold food.

He walked around it slowly and stopped a few feet from me.

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