You sit on Olivia’s old couch with your knees pressed together, hands shaking so badly you can barely undo the last button of your jacket. The room is dim, lit by a single yellow bulb that makes every dirty bottle and abandoned spoon look like evidence.
The baby’s tiny mouth searches through fabric like a desperate little compass, and the moment you pull your shirt aside, her latch is instant. Not gentle, not polite. Pure survival.
A sharp pain stabs through you, the kind that makes your eyes water, because your body has been holding this back like a dam. Warm relief follows, so intense it almost feels wrong.
You bite down on a sob, because the sound in your head is not Sonia swallowing. It’s Maximiliano breathing, the version of him your body refuses to bury.
Across the room, Elías stands by the window with his back turned, shoulders rigid like he’s trying to make himself smaller. He’s pretending to stare out at the snow, but you can see his hands clenching and unclenching.
“I’m sorry,” you whisper, not even sure who you’re apologizing to. Olivia’s ghost, maybe. Your own grief. The house.
Elías answers without turning around. “Don’t be,” he says, voice cracked. “Just… don’t stop.”
You close your eyes. Sonia’s little fingers curl into your shirt, gripping as if she’s afraid you’ll disappear. When she swallows, the sound is soft and steady, and it fills a place in you that has been echoing for weeks.
Your chest loosens, but your heart tightens. Because comfort can be cruel when it arrives wearing someone else’s tragedy.
After a while, Sonia slows. Her eyelids flutter, and her whole body goes slack against you, milk-drunk and calm for the first time in who knows how long.
You look down at her face. She has Olivia’s mouth. Elías’s eyebrows. A tiny crease between them like she’s already learned the world is heavy.
You lift your gaze, and Elías is watching now, turned halfway toward you. His eyes are red and raw, like the skin has been scrubbed away by sleepless nights.
He clears his throat. “She… she hasn’t slept like that since the funeral.”
The words hit you like cold water.
You nod, swallowing hard, careful not to wake the baby. “She was hungry,” you say, as if that explains the miracle.
Elías lets out a sound that is half laugh, half broken breath. “I tried formula,” he says. “Every brand. Every bottle. She spits it out, or she cries until she turns purple.”
He gestures helplessly toward the table littered with cans and nipples and lids. “I thought I was doing it wrong. I thought… maybe she was punishing me for being alive.”
Your throat tightens. You glance at the floral apron hanging like a memory and feel shame crawl up your spine.
“Where’s your mom?” you ask quietly. “Or Olivia’s family?”
Elías’s mouth twists. “Her mother came for the funeral,” he says. “Left the next morning. Said she couldn’t handle the cold… or the crying.”
He pauses, jaw clenched. “My dad’s dead. My brothers are in the city. They say they’ll visit, but they don’t.”
You know that kind of abandonment. You’ve watched it walk out the door wearing Daniel’s jacket.
Sonia sighs in her sleep, a tiny puff of air that makes your whole chest ache.
Elías steps closer, cautious, like you’re holding something sacred and fragile and he doesn’t want to scare it away. “Are you… okay?” he asks.
The question is simple, but it feels impossible.
You stare at the baby’s soft cheek pressed to your skin and realize the truth: you have not been okay since the ultrasound room, since the silence that meant no heartbeat, since the doctor’s eyes avoided yours.
“I’m… functioning,” you say.
Elías nods like he understands exactly what you mean. Then he hesitates, and when he speaks again, his voice is so quiet it almost disappears.
“If you… if you could come again,” he says, “I would pay you. I don’t have much, but—”
“No,” you interrupt too fast, almost sharp. “No money.”
Elías flinches.
You soften immediately, guilt blooming. “I didn’t mean—” You inhale. “I can’t take money for this. I don’t even know what this is.”
Elías looks down at Sonia, then back at you. “It’s saving her,” he says simply.
You look away, eyes stinging.
“It’s also… saving me,” you admit, and the confession tastes like something dangerous.
Because you didn’t come here to heal. You came here because the milk wouldn’t stop, and because a baby’s cry is louder than pride.
But healing doesn’t ask permission. It just happens where it happens.
That night, you walk home through snow that squeaks under your boots like tiny bones. Your breasts feel lighter, your body less like a betrayal.
Yet your chest still aches with another kind of fullness.
When you step into your own house, your mother looks up from the stove, eyes swollen. She sees your face and knows something happened.
“¿Qué hiciste?” she whispers, scared.
You hang your jacket slowly. “I fed Sonia,” you say.
Your mother’s hand flies to her mouth. Your father lowers the newspaper he hasn’t been reading.
The kitchen fills with silence, thick and judgmental.
“That’s not your baby,” your father says, not cruel but cautious. “People will talk.”
You laugh once, sharp and tired. “People already talk,” you say. “They talked when my belly grew. They talked when I buried him. They talked when Daniel left.”
Your mother’s eyes fill. “And now?” she asks softly.
You stare at the table where Maximiliano’s unused pacifier still sits in its package like a taunt.
“Now I do something that makes sense,” you answer.
The next morning, the milk comes in again like nothing changed. Your breasts ache, heavy and hot, as if your body is a stubborn factory that refuses to shut down.
You wrap yourself tighter, and you walk back to Elías’s house before you can overthink it.
This time, he opens the door before you even knock. His hair is messy, his eyes ringed dark, but there’s a flicker of hope in his face that feels almost indecent.
Sonia cries from somewhere inside, thin and frantic. The moment she sees you, the cry shifts, like recognition.
Elías looks at you like you’re a storm and a sunrise at once.
“I didn’t know if you’d come,” he says.
You step inside, heart pounding. “I didn’t know if I should,” you admit.
Sonia’s wail cuts through you, and your body responds before your mind finishes thinking. You reach out your arms.
Elías hands her over like a man surrendering the last thing he owns.
Sonia latches again, and peace falls over the room like a blanket.
Elías sits on the edge of a chair across from you, hands clasped so tight his knuckles whiten. He watches the baby’s jaw move, watches your face, then looks away like he’s embarrassed to witness tenderness.
“You were close with Olivia,” you say gently.
Elías swallows. “We weren’t perfect,” he admits. “But she was… my home.”
He rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand. “And now the house feels haunted. Not by her. By my failure.”
“You didn’t fail her,” you say.
He laughs without humor. “She’s dead,” he replies. “So either I failed, or the world did.”
You don’t have an argument strong enough to beat grief.
So you don’t try.
You just sit there with Sonia asleep against you, and you let your presence be the answer.
Days turn into weeks.
You come every morning and sometimes again at night, because Sonia grows hungrier, and because your milk refuses to understand that Maximiliano is gone. Your body becomes a bridge between two tragedies, and you start to realize bridges don’t ask which side deserves saving more.
Elías begins to look less like a ghost. He shaves. He washes dishes. He learns to cook oatmeal without burning it.
He starts talking to Sonia while you feed her, telling her stories about Olivia’s laugh, about how she used to sing while hanging laundry, about the way she danced badly on purpose just to make him smile.
You listen, and sometimes you cry quietly, because Olivia becomes real to you again, not just a funeral memory.
And Sonia becomes real too.
Not a symbol. Not a mission.
A baby with warm breath and tiny hiccups and a stubborn grip on your shirt.
The town notices.
Of course it does.
San Jacinto de la Sierra is small enough that secrets can’t hide. People see you walking from your house to Elías’s, day after day, and their imaginations do what imaginations do when they’re bored.
One afternoon, you’re leaving Elías’s place when you hear voices by the tienda.
“Look at her,” a woman mutters. “Already moved in on the widower.”
Another laughs. “She lost her baby, so now she’s trying to take someone else’s.”
The words sting like cold air in your lungs. Your cheeks burn, not because you’re ashamed, but because you’re tired of being judged by people who never lifted a finger to help.
You keep walking, chin up, boots crunching snow like punctuation.
But that night, the gossip finds its way to your front door in the shape of Daniel.
He shows up like a bad memory deciding it deserves a sequel.
He knocks twice, hard, and when you open it, he’s standing there with a smug little smile and a new jacket, like he’s trying on a new life.
“Nati,” he says, as if he didn’t leave you bleeding inside. “I heard things.”
Your stomach twists.
“What do you want?” you ask.
Daniel’s eyes flick over you, judging. “Is it true?” he asks. “You’re… breastfeeding some guy’s baby?”
You stare at him, and it’s almost funny how quickly your love for him evaporated into disgust. Not because he’s wrong to ask, but because he thinks he has the right.
“Yes,” you say. “It’s true.”
Daniel’s mouth twists into a grin that makes your skin crawl. “So you’re playing mommy for another man,” he says. “Guess you didn’t waste any time.”
Your hands clench at your sides.
“Leave,” you say.
