Teresa retrieves the rabbit and places it in Sofía’s hands. The child stares at you. Children do not understand class the way adults do. They understand tone. Hands. Eyes. Safety.
Something in her face shifts. She is still frightened, but no longer of you.
“Are you still sad?” she asks.
The question cuts deeper than any doctor ever has.
Nobody rescues you from it. Not Carmen. Not Teresa. Not the walls. It simply hangs there in your office—absurdly simple, impossibly pure.
You built an empire because you hated helplessness. You turned every room you controlled into a machine because tenderness looked too much like weakness after your wife died and your body failed and the papers started speaking about succession before you had even finished grieving.
And a three-year-old child sees through all of it in one sentence.
“Yes,” you tell her.
It is the most honest thing you have said in years.
She nods as if that explains everything.
Then, still shaking, she wriggles down from her mother’s arms, walks carefully to your chair, and places the rabbit in your lap.
“Pico helps,” she says.
Teresa cries first.