“She needed her mother.”
My father started to speak, but I had no more time to give him.
I turned and walked out.
I did not slam the door.
That was my first victory.
In the car, I called Ivan three times.
No answer.
I called again.
Voicemail.
Then I called his mother, Irma.
She picked up on the first ring.
“Patricia,” she said, voice guarded.
“Is Renata with you?”
A pause. “She is fine.”
I closed my eyes for half a second, just long enough to keep from shaking.
“I am coming to get her.”
“No,” Irma said. “The child is staying here for now.”
My hand tightened on the steering wheel. “Excuse me?”
“Your family brought her. They said you agreed.”
“I did not agree to anything.”
“That is what you are saying now.”
“Put Renata on the phone.”
“No. Not until someone explains what is happening.”
Then she hung up.
For a few seconds, I sat in the driveway with the phone in my lap.
The neighborhood outside the windshield looked offensively normal. Sprinklers ticking in someone’s yard. A delivery truck slowing near the corner. Two boys on bikes racing past a row of trimmed hedges. My daughter was gone, my family had voted her out of her own room, and the world still had the nerve to continue.
I started the car.
Ivan’s parents lived forty minutes away in a smaller suburb, in a brick house with a basketball hoop in the driveway and a row of potted plants lining the porch. Traffic was heavy near the interstate, every red light a fresh test of my restraint. I called Ivan again at a stop. No answer. I called once more. Nothing.
When I reached Irma’s house, I parked too quickly and had to remind myself to walk, not run.
Irma opened the door only a few inches.
She was a compact woman in her early sixties with silver hair pulled tight and eyes that could turn warm or hard depending on whether she had decided you belonged. That day, they were hard.
“Where is my daughter?” I asked.
“She is here.”
“I want to see her.”
“You are not taking her just like that.”
Armando appeared behind her, taller, quiet, arms crossed. Ivan’s father had never been affectionate toward me, but he had also never been cruel. He was the sort of man who watched first and spoke after the room got tired of filling itself.
“My parents brought Renata here without my consent,” I said. “I came home from a twenty-four-hour shift and she was gone.”
Irma’s expression flickered. “They said you sent her.”