The wind scrapes sand across the stones around you, dry and sharp, and the old man’s words stay suspended in the heat like something alive. What I carry… is for you. The sentence should sound absurd. It should collapse under the weight of common sense. But out there, in the empty stillness of the desert, common sense feels smaller than destiny.
You stare at him, breathing hard, one hand pressed to your aching lower back and the other on the curve of your stomach.
At twenty-four, you should not feel this old.
But grief ages people in strange ways. So does hunger. So does being left alone in a world that treats a pregnant widow like bad weather—something inconvenient, something to be avoided, something people pity just enough to talk about and not enough to help. Three months ago, your husband Tomás was alive, laughing, sun-browned, and full of plans. Then came the accident no one explained clearly, the closed coffin, the quiet lies, and the sudden way the town stopped looking at you like a person and started looking at you like a warning.
