door, maybe to toss it outside, maybe to think.

Helena was wiping the counter furiously, as if cleaning the kitchen could erase what had happened in it.

“If anyone asks, she fell,” Victor said.

“She got dizzy and fell.”

“Your sister recorded half of it,” Raúl shot back.

“Then delete it,” Helena said immediately.

Nora didn’t move.

I turned my head enough to see her face.

The bravado was gone.

She looked pale.

Her thumb hovered over her screen, but she wasn’t pressing anything.

For the first time since I’d known her, she looked like a person standing at the edge of something she couldn’t joke her way out of.

Then the front door crashed open downstairs.

The sound shook the entire house.

“MARINA!” Alex’s voice thundered through the hallway.

Every person in that kitchen froze.

Raúl stood so fast his chair toppled backward.

Helena grabbed Nora’s wrist.

“Delete it now,” she hissed.

Nora jerked her hand away.

Victor looked from me to the fallen stick to the kitchen entrance.

Fear changed his face so completely it was almost grotesque.

The man who had just towered over me now looked like a boy caught setting fire to a room.

Heavy footsteps pounded up the stairs.

Victor lunged toward me, not to help but to haul me upright before Alex could see me on the floor.

His hand closed around my arm.

A second later, Alex came through the doorway.

He took in the scene in a single sweep.

Me on the tile, crying.

Victor gripping my arm.

The broken phone pieces near the wall.

Nora’s raised screen.

The stick on the floor.

I’ve never seen silence hit a room the way it hit that one.

Alex’s voice, when it came, was low and controlled in a way that frightened everyone more than shouting would have.

“Take your hand off my sister.”

Victor let go, but not out of decency.

He let go because Alex had already crossed half the room.

Behind him I heard more footsteps.

Two sheriff’s deputies entered the kitchen almost immediately, hands near their belts, faces hard.

Alex had called 911 from the truck as soon as he saw my message and my location.

He hadn’t wasted a second.

“What happened here?” one deputy demanded.

“She fell,” Helena said too quickly.

“She did not fall,” Alex said.

Victor tried to straighten his shoulders.

“This is a family matter.”

The deputy glanced at my thigh, already darkening under my torn nightclothes, then at the stick.

“Not anymore.”

Everything moved at once after that.

One deputy separated Victor from the rest of us.

The other knelt near me and asked my name, the date, whether I could feel the baby moving.

Alex dropped beside me, his hands hovering before he touched me, like he was afraid I might break.

“I’m here,” he said.

“I’ve got you.”

That was the first moment I believed I might live through the morning.

Helena kept talking, words spilling faster the more the deputies ignored her.

“She has always been unstable.

She’s hormonal.

She screams whenever she doesn’t get her way.”

Raúl nodded along so hard it looked painful.

“Victor was trying to help her up.”

Nora made a sound then.

Not a word.

More like someone choking on the truth.

The deputy nearest