You closed your eyes for a moment and saw Elena as she had been in those last weeks, thinner than seemed possible, wrapped in a cream shawl by the bedroom window, one hand resting lightly over the blanket where her body no longer obeyed her but her mind still ruled everything in sight. People romanticize the dying as if pain turns them into saints. Elena had become something far more useful. She had become impossible to fool.
“You’ll need patience now,” Hernán said.
You laughed once, low in your throat.
“My son married a woman who moved me to the kitchen staff section at my own ranch and came after breakfast with a nursing home brochure. Patience is the one thing I’ve got left in industrial quantities.”
Hernán smiled then, a small vicious curl at one corner of his mouth.
