Imagine how as I do the pulldown or squats I can’t stop thinking about a box with a hummingbird in it. Even as I try so hard not to think about it.

Because I’ve brought it with me. Because I plan on hiding it in a locker. Even bought a special lock to make it safer. I can’t keep it in the office. I can’t keep it at home. I can’t bring myself to open a bank safe box for it—that feels like a tell. It might not be safe in the gym, either, but I haven’t figured out yet that it isn’t safe anywhere.

Imagine me trying for a few new gym records while Charlie watches over all, impassive. Because it doesn’t make a difference to anyone but me. Exerting myself until I’m so sore, I don’t even feel the soreness.

But after, at least, I feel a lot better. Always do, before it gets worse again.

[11]

The first time I saw Silvina wasn’t in the photographs in a file. Not really. Not in a true sense. In all the photographs, Silvina looked stiff, uncomfortable. Resembled a corpse, propped up in a chair or leaning against a balcony railing. Back problems plagued her, and she didn’t like her photo taken, or she didn’t like the photographers. Or she’d told them not to and they did it anyway.

First time was a grainy video, twenty seconds, in an old nature documentary uploaded to the internet. The lighting was bad on purpose, in deference to her sensitivity. I can’t remember how many days after I found the hummingbird I found the video. The shock of wild black hair I noticed first. How she didn’t like to tame it, or pulled it back in a ponytail rather than deal with it. Then, that she didn’t know where to put her arms—on the chair, crossed in her lap. Silvina had large hands, strong, rough, calloused.

She kept looking down, away from the camera lens, so I almost couldn’t see her face. But right at the end, she raised her head, and I saw the tight cheekbones, the firm set of the strong jaw. Determined, dangerous.

Her eyes were so dark, they registered as black. Set across a face a little too narrow in a charming way. Slightly sad, distant expression, even when she smiled. But the smile broadened her face, too, and then she was kind of beautiful.

In her practical clothes just one level better than army fatigues. If not for the floral pattern of the shirt, she could have been the spokesperson for some people’s army. When she crossed her legs, you could see she’d tucked her khaki pants into hiking boots. A silver bracelet on her right wrist, but no other adornment. Reading glasses on a chain hung down over the shirt, as if she was an old lady in a rocking chair.

Later, I would learn the bracelet was from her mother. The one thing she wouldn’t give up from her past.