I pray to God he finds Hector and our girls are safe.

My crumbled feet rest on the bus, but crack more when I get there as I wash dirty ass after dirty ass—it’s amazing how much waste these shriveled bodies produce—and empty their bedpans and change their sheets and all the while Hector is doing God knows what to my daughters.

Despite the exhaustion and panic and continuous feeling that I will throw up, I see the day for what it is, which is clear and beautiful—how cruel the world can be.

Later Mrs. Julienne asks me to adjust her bed.

Adjust reminds me of yesterday and of coming home dead tired with at least the anticipation of four little children waiting for me with so much excitement and how if there had been no adjust they would all still be there—and I burst into tears.

“Are they working you too hard?” she asks me, patting my hand.

Her doughy touch triggers an avalanche. Away with the plastic face for this total stranger, all cracks and withers, who’s been in the world three times for my once. I break down.

“What’s your name, honey?”

“Dahlia,” I manage to squeak out between sobs.

“What a lovely name,” she tells me, though a lovely name has done nothing for me so far. “Dahlia, what is the matter?”

Out it spills—in English I didn’t know I knew—the rest of the avalanche. My country I may never see again. My injured idiot husband who can’t even look after our children well enough to keep them from being picked off the street by crazy Hector. To come this far only to be poorer than you were when you started poor and then to have your children stolen is more than is worth enduring.

Mrs. Julienne’s skin is pale, deep pale, not just the usual dead white. “This is terrible. What are you doing here today?”

“They say they fire me if I don’t come.”

Without so much as a blink or one question more, Mrs. Julienne rings the emergency button for the nurse who comes in immediately.

“I am appalled. Dahlia has a personal emergency. Her two children have been kidnapped. Either you give her the next few days off as paid leave, or I will move to another hospital, taking all of your credibility with me.”

The nurse calls her supervisor, who calls the director, who apologizes, calls a taxi, pays for it, and tells me to take all the time I need.

When I get home there are police cars in front of our building and I feel my heart drop to my cracking toes. They are dead, I tell myself. Don’t expect anything good because they are dead.

But they aren’t dead. They are playing in the living room with Fatima and Selim.