Carmen not long after. Quietly, one hand over her mouth, the other covering her daughter’s shoulder like she still can’t believe this happened inside the same house where she scrubbed floors and memorized rules about silence. You do not cry. Not because you do not want to. Because the shock is still holding you together by force.
You look down at the rabbit in your lap and understand, with a clarity that makes you sick, that no one has placed anything into your hands in two years except medicine, documents, and pity.
A child just gave you comfort without asking what you were worth first.
By noon, your doctor arrives.
Not the neurologist Mauricio has been parading through the house the last few months. Your actual physician, Dr. Treviño, a hard-faced woman from Cumbres who has known your blood pressure since you were thirty and your bad habits since you were twenty-five. She comes in angry enough to strip paint.
“Who changed his muscle relaxants?” she asks before even greeting the room.
Rosa looks at Carmen. Carmen looks at you.
You don’t answer right away because the question lands on top of too many others all at once. Over the last six months, your body has not merely plateaued. It has receded. Your mornings have gotten foggier. Your speech, when it came in fragments at night, vanished completely after afternoon doses. You assumed that was failure—your body punishing you for refusing enough therapy, for hating dependence too much to work with it properly.
Now you wonder if some of that helplessness was purchased for you.
Dr. Treviño holds up two pill bottles.
“These are not what I prescribed.”
The room changes temperature.
Carmen presses her lips together hard enough that you know she’s trying not to speak out of turn. Rosa goes pale. You feel your pulse beginning to hammer again, not from physical strain now but from the simple, monstrous implication of it.
Someone wanted you quieter than illness required.
