“Nothing,” Alma said too fast.
“That wasn’t nothing.”
“It’s just… he gets tight sometimes. When I’ve walked too much.”
“Since when?”
“Since yesterday.”
Jacinta was already standing.
“You’re not sleeping under any roof but mine tonight,” she said. “And tomorrow we’re going to the clinic in Santa Rosa.”
Alma shook her head instantly.
“No. No clinics. They’ll ask questions.”
“They can ask whatever they want. You need to be checked.”
“If the Valdéses are watching—”
“If the Valdéses are watching,” Jacinta cut in, “then let them watch a widow taking a pregnant girl for medical care. They’ll still have to get through me.”
There are sentences that sound ordinary until you realize they are weapons.
That was one of them.
Alma looked at her and started crying again, not from fear this time, but from the unbearable shock of being defended.
Jacinta clicked her tongue and pretended not to notice.
“Finish your milk,” she said. “Then you’re sleeping in my room and I’ll take the sofa.”
“I can’t take your bed.”
“You can and you will. You and that baby have already spent enough time in mud.”
By sunrise the storm had moved east, leaving behind that washed, silvered look the countryside wears after a hard rain, as if every leaf had been individually polished. The yard was a battlefield of puddles. The chickens, offended by the weather and by life in general, complained from inside the coop like old women at a church raffle.
Jacinta was up before dawn.
She kneaded masa, fed the hens, packed a shawl, a thermos, two tamales, and the folded note Alma had dropped the night before. She did not mention the note yet. Some truths require full daylight.
When Alma emerged from the bedroom, she looked embarrassed by the clean clothes and rested by maybe half a breath, but still too thin, too hollow-eyed, too prepared to run.
“You eat first,” Jacinta said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“That’s unfortunate because breakfast doesn’t care.”
Alma obeyed.
An hour later they were on the road to Santa Rosa in Jacinta’s old pickup, the one her husband had rebuilt twice and painted once in a shade of blue that now looked mostly like memory. The tires spat mud. The windshield squeaked. The engine made sounds like a grumpy mule but kept going, which in Jacinta’s opinion was the definition of virtue.
You could tell Alma was not used to being driven anywhere without feeling indebted for it.
She kept her hands in her lap, shoulders tight, eyes jumping to the rearview mirror every few minutes.
“Nobody’s following us,” Jacinta said at last.
“How do you know?”
“Because if they were professionals, we wouldn’t notice. And if they were local idiots, they’d have gotten stuck at the washout by the Miller place.”
Alma almost smiled.
Almost.
The clinic in Santa Rosa was small, crowded, and perpetually underfunded, with faded posters on the walls and the smell of disinfectant clinging to everything like stubborn hope. The nurse at the front desk knew Jacinta by name, by family history, and by blood pressure. Small towns store personal information the way barns store dust. Generously and everywhere.
“This is my niece,” Jacinta said before Alma could panic. “She’s been having tightening.”
The nurse nodded without comment. Whatever she thought, she kept it behind professional eyes.
The doctor, a middle-aged woman named Dr. Elena Ruiz with practical hair and zero patience for nonsense, examined Alma, checked the baby, and said the words that made both of them finally breathe again.
“No labor. But she’s dehydrated, overtired, and too stressed. She needs rest, regular food, and no more sleeping outdoors like she’s trying to audition for tragedy.”
Jacinta thanked her.
Alma cried in relief on the way back to the truck.
At the pharmacy next door, Jacinta bought vitamins, electrolyte packets, and a jar of cocoa powder because she had once been pregnant in winter and knew the body sometimes needed sweetness as much as medicine.
