Mrs. Alvarez chuckled softly. "That is the most honest answer I've heard all week." She squeezed Lena's arm reassuringly on her way out the door. "Try to get some sleep tonight, Lena."
Lena waited until the deadbolt clicked into place, then went into the tiny kitchen and turned on the small stove burner under a pot of leftover beans. The apartment smelled of onion, radiator heat, and laundry soap—ordinary, stable things that belonged to a life no one glamorous had ever noticed until now.
Annie followed her into the kitchen, her crayon still in her hand. "Did you call the judge, Mama?"
Lena glanced down at her. "Yes."
"What did he say?"
"That nobody gets to take you away from me because of one dance."
Annie nodded once, absorbing the legal baseline. "Did he say the rich man was telling the truth?"
Lena stirred the pot slowly, watching the steam rise. "He said the rich man was serious."
Annie seemed to file that away into a separate mental category. *Serious* was not the same thing as *good*. Children understood those fine distinctions; adults were usually the ones who blurred them.
That night after dinner, while Lena was folding towels still warm from the laundromat dryer, the phone rang. It wasn't her cell phone; it was the landline—a number very few people used anymore. For a second, she only stared at the plastic receiver. Then, she picked it up. "Hello?"
"Ms. Bell." Charles Whitmore's voice was unmistakable, even stripped of the ballroom's grand acoustics. It was calm, controlled, and too exact to be accidental. "Thank you for calling Judge Mercer. He informed me you had spoken."
Lena leaned back against the kitchen counter, watching Annie in the living room, who was humming under her breath as she lined up her crayons by color. "I called because I prefer hard facts to public spectacle, Mr. Whitmore."
"A very sensible preference."