Her daughter Isabella had talked like that. Same stubborn chin. Same impossible heart. Isabella, who became a nurse because she could not walk past suffering without taking it personally. Isabella, who worked too hard, slept too little, gave too much, and still died with apologies on her lips for leaving them behind.
When Rosa opened her eyes, Lily was still standing there, blood on her knees, pleading with the face of the dead.
“He’s counting,” Lily whispered. “I told him to count until I came back.”
Rosa stood up slowly, every joint protesting.
She went to the hall closet, reached to the top shelf, and took down an old leather medical bag she had carried from Mexico three decades earlier. The bag was cracked. The supplies were mismatched, incomplete, some older than they should have been. But inside it lived the skill she had once trained for and America never let her use.
“Show me,” she said.
They found him still breathing.
That alone felt like a warning.
He was deeper in the shadow now, head lolling, lips moving.
“Three hundred seventy… two…”
Lily dropped to her knees beside him so quickly that Rosa’s heart clenched.
“I came back,” Lily said. “You did it. You kept counting.”
Dominic’s eyes found her through the haze.
Recognition flickered.
Lily smiled at him as if he had won something.
Rosa knelt opposite him and opened the bag.
Up close, the evidence was worse. Two entry wounds low in the abdomen. Massive blood loss. Shock. Exposure. His pulse was thready but present. The bullets had gone through, which was luck of a savage kind.
“He needs a hospital,” Rosa said.
“No,” Dominic rasped.
His hand caught her wrist again.
Even dying, he had the reflex of command.
