The steps stop near your door. The wire lock rattles slightly.
A voice speaks, low and amused. “Open up,” a man says. “We just want to talk.”
Your body turns to ice. Your mind races.
If you stay silent, they might leave. Or they might break in. If you speak, they’ll hear you, know exactly where you are.
You grip the revolver with shaking hands and whisper to your belly, “I’m sorry.”
Then you do something that surprises even you.
You speak loudly, projecting your voice like you learned in childhood when you needed to be heard over louder people. “If you touch that door,” you call out, “the priest will release everything.”
Silence.
Then a short laugh outside. “Priest?” the man says, as if religion is a joke. “You think God is going to save you?”
You swallow, forcing your voice to stay steady. “Not God,” you say. “The internet.”
Another pause. You hear a cigarette being lit, the tiny scratch of match or lighter. The smoke smell creeps in under the door.
“You’re just a pregnant widow,” the man says. “You don’t know what you’re playing with.”
Your spine stiffens. That sentence is supposed to crush you. It’s supposed to remind you of your place.
It does something else.
It makes you angry.
“I know exactly what I’m playing with,” you say. “Men who think women are too scared to speak.”
The wind moves through the trees. Your hands tremble around the gun, but your voice stays firm.
“You leave,” you say, “or tomorrow your face will be on every screen with the words ‘suspect’ beside it.”
Silence again.
Then footsteps retreat, not rushing, not defeated, but calculating. You listen until the sound is swallowed by the mountain.
Only then do you let yourself breathe, shaking so hard you nearly drop the revolver.
You spend the rest of the night sitting upright, eyes wide, listening for a return. Your baby shifts under your hand as if trying to comfort you from the inside.
When dawn finally comes, you feel like a person who survived a storm by becoming stone.
You go to Padre Miguel immediately. He doesn’t look surprised when you tell him.
“They’re cornered,” he says quietly. “Cornered animals bite.”
You nod. “What do I do?”
He looks at you with the sadness of someone who has prayed over too many graves. “You make sure you are never alone,” he says. “You stay in town for a while, among people, where they can’t act without witnesses. And you let the process move faster.”
You hate the idea of leaving your house, even temporarily. The house is cold, broken, haunted by past crimes, but it’s yours. It’s the first thing that has been yours in months.
Still, you think of your belly. You think of the voice outside your door. You don’t argue with survival.
Dona Celina takes you in. Her home is small but warm. The smell of beans on the stove makes your eyes sting. For the first time in months, you sleep without wind sliding over your skin like fingers.
The next day, the journalist calls.
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