Gaspar repeated without moving his lips: Dad, show me the door, and he felt the sweat drenching the back of his neck, his back, and he kept walking.

The flashlight beam fell upon the door, which was wide open. Had they left it like that? It didn’t matter. He sped up without a word, just in case, and he felt Vicky’s relief when she, too, saw the streetlights, the night outside, and let go of his waist and went running out to the sidewalk, safe. Pablo did the same, instinctively. Gaspar turned off the flashlight and looked at the house. From outside, it looked the same as always. Small, ugly, gray, its windows bricked up. Dark. He handed the flashlight to Pablo. He couldn’t speak. Vicky was different now: her long, tousled hair gave her an adult air. She hugged him fast but tight, and said, you’re soaked in sweat, and then, thank you, thank you. Outside, she was back to being decisive.

“Let’s go to my house. My parents can call the police, we have to get Adela out of there.”

And with that Vicky took off running straight to her house; Pablo and Gaspar followed her. Are you sure someone touched you? Gaspar wanted to know, and Pablo, running but looking him in the eye, said yes and no. He could have imagined it. Are you going to tell the truth? Pablo asked, and Gaspar said yes. And he was going to tell the truth about what he’d seen, but only up until Adela went into the room. He wasn’t going to talk about the flashlight beam the others couldn’t see, or the magnificent staircase, or the piano, or say that he had opened the door himself without any effort, as if the door had obeyed him. As if it had been waiting for him.

He had brought Adela there. He was sure of it. He had delivered her to the house. He hadn’t been able to stop her when she ran—a girl as light as a toy, a girl who was missing an arm! And he, big as he was, hadn’t been able to stop her because she’d stuck her fingers in his eyes! Now the guilt twisted his chest from inside, now he knew the only person who could tell him where Adela was and who had taken her was his father, and his father wasn’t going to talk to him ever again.

Everything that happened after that happened for Gaspar through a kind of fog. As if he had rubbed his eyes until he was half-blind. And as if that partial blindness, that gray mist, had spread throughout his whole body. A distance between him and everyone else, between him and what others said and did, as if he were watching a movie on mute through smoke.