**My mother-in-law emptied my dead daughter’s room.** Regina was only three years old. I came back from the cemetery with fresh white daisies still in my hand, and the door to my little Regi’s room was standing wide open.
Three.
“Hello?” Rodrigo answered, sounding nervous.
I didn’t let him speak.
“I’m home. Your mother’s here. Standing next to the crib you had set up in Regina’s room.”
Silence.
“Diana… this isn’t something we should discuss over the phone.”
“It is exactly something we should discuss over the phone.”
“I only have one question.”
“Can you have children… yes or no?”
He took a long breath.
“It’s not that simple…”
“Yes or no, Rodrigo.”
“Not… not the way you think.”
“Not the way you think.”
The floor seemed to shift beneath my feet.
Behind me, Doña Amparo covered her mouth.
You knew.
You knew everything.
“Then whose baby is coming into this house?” I asked.
Instead of answering, he whispered my name the way someone does before delivering news that will break your heart.
“Diana… we had to make a decision.”
“You weren’t really here anymore.”
“You’d been gone for a whole year.”
I hung up.
I couldn’t bear another word.
I walked to the drawer by the front door—the one overflowing with unopened envelopes.
My hands were shaking so badly that half of them fell onto the floor.
Every single one was from the fertility clinic.
One.
Two.
Five.
Eight.
Every envelope was stamped with one word:
URGENT.
I tore open the oldest one.
It had been mailed eleven months earlier…
Just after we buried Regina.
Buried among lines of medical jargon I couldn’t understand were two words that I understood perfectly.
Last Embryo.
