Chapter 157: Nine Days
"Moved up why," Sorina said on the call she placed through immediately, after seeing her sister's message.
"Administrative," Yara said. "Federal caseload restructuring. Half the hearings in his facility moved forward six weeks and nobody thought to tell the families until the notices went out."
"Are you going?"
Yara did not answer immediately.
"I have nine days to decide," she said.
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She did not decide for six of them.
She told herself she was thinking about it. What she was actually doing was working — running the family with the same steady competence she always had, sitting through the Cattaneo review, approving Sorina's revised intelligence structure, taking Sofia to the park on Saturday and pushing her on a swing for forty minutes while Sofia shrieked with laughter and demanded, repeatedly and with total conviction, to go higher.
She thought about Diego at odd moments. In the car. In the shower. At three in the morning once, awake for no reason, listening to Rafael breathe beside her.
She did not think about him deliberately. He simply arrived, the way he had always arrived in her life — unannounced, at inconvenient times, without asking whether she had room for him.
On the seventh day she took the box out of her desk drawer again and reread both letters.
Then she went to find Rafael.
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He was in the nursery, which was where he increasingly was in the evenings. Sofia was in her crib, not asleep, holding a conversation with the ceiling in a language that consisted primarily of vowels.
"I have not decided," Yara said from the doorway.
"I know," Rafael said.
"You have not asked."
"You would have told me when you were ready." He looked up at her. "Are you ready?"
"No," she said, and came in and sat on the floor beside the crib. "I keep running the arguments and they keep coming out even."
"Tell me both sides."
Yara pulled her knees up.
"If I go," she said, "I sit in a room and listen to a parole board discuss whether my brother has been sufficiently rehabilitated, and Diego sees me there, and whatever happens after that happens with the fact of my presence attached to it. If he is denied, I watched it. If he is granted, I was there for it. Either way I have made a statement."
"And if you do not go."
"Then I have also made a statement," Yara said. "A clearer one. That I have not attended in three years and I am not attending now and whatever we are to each other exists entirely inside two letters in a drawer."
Rafael was quiet for a moment.
"Which one frightens you," he said.
Yara looked at the crib. Sofia had found her own foot and was regarding it with enormous suspicion.
"Going," she said. "Obviously."
"Why."
"Because I do not know what I would feel," Yara said. "That is the honest answer. I forgave him in a warehouse three years ago and I meant it and I have not had to test it since. Forgiveness is very easy at a distance." She paused. "If I sit in a room and look at him, I find out whether I actually meant it or whether I just needed to stop carrying it."
"Those might both be true," Rafael said.
"Yes," she said. "That is what frightens me."
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She spoke to Sorina about it on the Thursday, two days before.
"May I say something you will not enjoy," Sorina said.
"That is generally when you are most useful."
"You are treating this as a decision about Diego," Sorina said. "It is not. He is going to sit in that room whether you are in it or not. The hearing will proceed identically. Your presence changes nothing about the outcome." She paused. "This is entirely a decision about you."
"That does not make it simpler."
"No," Sorina agreed. "It makes it harder. But it makes it the right question." She turned her glass. "You have spent two years asking whether things are strategically correct. Dr. Reyes asked you what all of it cost. This is the first thing in a long time that has no strategic dimension whatsoever, and I think that is why you cannot decide it."
Yara looked at her for a long moment.
"You have become extremely irritating," she said.
"I have had good teachers," Sorina said.
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She decided on the morning of the eighth day.
She was in the kitchen at six, making coffee, and Sofia was awake early and sitting in her high chair destroying a piece of toast with great seriousness, and Yara looked at her daughter and thought, without warning:
One day she will be old enough to ask what I did.
Not about the family. Not about the business or the wars or any of the things she would eventually have to be told carefully and in pieces.
About this. About whether her mother had gone into a room to look at her brother.
"I am going," she said out loud.
Sofia looked up, interested.
"Not you," Yara said. "You are staying here and eating that."
Sofia returned to her toast with renewed commitment.
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The hearing was at ten in the morning in a room that looked like every institutional room Yara had ever been in — beige, overlit, arranged for procedure rather than people.
She sat in the back.
She did not tell anyone she was coming, including the prison. She had arranged access through Elena and the federal contact and she had told Rafael and nobody else.
At three minutes past ten, they brought Diego in.
He was thinner. Grayer at the temples than she expected. He walked with the particular careful economy of a man who had spent three years in a place where large movements attracted attention.
He sat down. He looked at the board.
Then, in the way people do when they feel something before they understand it, he turned his head and looked at the back of the room.
He saw her.
And Yara watched her brother's face do something she had never seen it do in thirty-one years of knowing him — it simply broke open, all at once, with no strategy or performance or charm anywhere in it.
He looked away fast. He put his hand over his mouth.
The chair of the board said his name twice before he answered.