Chương 27: Chapter 26: Kaela, My Sweet Kaela

After Anya saw Selena off with her tired smile and that "May the Flow guide you" that had already become a ritual, Selena broke into a run. Her sandals struck the dirt of the road with urgency, kicking up small plumes of dust that the morning wind carelessly dispersed. She had to catch Kaela. The tanner was walking with her usual determined stride, heading back toward the fish market, toward that territory of scale-scented air and brine where her calloused hands found a precarious but steady sustenance.

Selena reached her, panting slightly, and placed a hand on her shoulder. When Kaela turned with that arched eyebrow that was already so familiar, Selena released the words without preamble: —Our deal still stands. I need you to guide me through the streets. Kaela accepted. The nod was minimal, almost imperceptible, but Selena saw it. In that tiny, contained gesture, she knew her friend understood that this wasn't just about pennies and lies, but about something much deeper. They walked together for a few minutes.

The bustle of Terracanto's awakening enveloped them: distant street cries, the screech of an ill-greased cart, the cry of a child in some adobe house. Selena looked at the ground, her eyes fixed on the earth she trod, on the stones she dodged. Until they reached a more open area, beside the market street of the West District. There, Selena spoke. —Enara left today. We probably won't see her again. Kaela didn't flinch. Her face, weathered by years of hard labor and hostile streets, remained impassive.

But her response, when it came, was laden with a bitter familiarity, with that knowledge acquired only when life teaches you too soon that nothing lasts. —I know— Her voice was flat, devoid of inflection. —No one says anything about it, but you can see it in all our faces. The shelter is only temporary. She paused. A long, deep sigh escaped her chest, one that seemed to drag the weight of years of hardship, of losses accumulated like stones at the bottom of a well. —And I, more than anyone, know that clearly.

Selena turned her head slightly, searching for her eyes, but Kaela wasn't looking at her. Her gaze was fixed on some distant point, beyond the trees, beyond the creek, beyond perhaps everything that could be seen. —My sick brother, and Papa too— Kaela continued, her voice surprisingly serene in brutal contrast to the storm that must have been breaking inside her. —They both died of one of those diseases that doesn't even have a name yet. They kept walking.

Her words flowed like the dirty water of the creek, slow and heavy with waste, dragging along the remains of a childhood that should never have been this way. —With no one to look after me, Mama sent me to learn the tanner's trade when I was ten years old. —A spasm of pain crossed her face, quick as lightning, but Selena saw it. She saw it and felt it in her own chest, like an echo— But a woman alone can't pay for a house by herself, you know? The question floated in the air, rhetorical and heartbreaking.

She didn't expect an answer. There wasn't one. —And Mama… — Kaela's voice finally broke. It was a slight tremor, barely a crack in her fortress, but enough for Selena to know that what came next was the hardest part. —Mama had to live like I do. In the shelters. Every fifteen days, with what little money she had, she would rent a bed to sleep surrounded by other women. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. She fell silent for a moment.

Selena saw, from the corner of her eye, how two silent tears traced clean paths through the dust on Kaela's cheeks. Her voice, however, remained steady, as if she were narrating someone else's story, something that could be observed from a distance. —No woman lasts in this life for more than five years. Not Mama, at least— She paused, and when she spoke again, her words fell like stones into a bottomless pit. —She died of exhaustion. In the laundries by the creek. Selena walked in silence.

One step, another, another. She felt Kaela's words settle in her chest like physical weight, like a slab threatening to crush her. And then, without thinking, without weighing the consequences, without that constant calculation she had learned to perform since waking up in this foreign body, she simply stopped and embraced her. The sleeves of her dress dampened immediately.

She felt the heat of Kaela's body against her own, felt her shoulders shake slightly, felt that narrow opening where the pain contained for years finally found an exit. She felt her friend's confession as her own, as if Kaela's losses were also a bit hers, pain being the only truly universal language. The deep-rooted sorrow crystallized in her eyes. Tears pricked, sharp and hot, but she did not cry. It was not her moment.

It was Kaela's, and now she had to give her the embrace that allowed her to break free, the same embrace Kaela had given her under the coral tree when her own tears threatened to drown her. —Kaela— she pronounced each letter with care, with affection, as if the words were a balm to be applied to an open wound. —We can't always carry it all. Only that. Then she remained silent. No more was needed.

Kaela spoke with a cracked voice, that broken voice Selena knew well, the one that emerges when defenses fall and the soul is left exposed, vulnerable, human. —Those were her words when I had to leave her— Her breathing was shallow, irregular. —But the last thing she said, I remember well: 'Kaela, my sweet Kaela'. The girl fell silent. Her tears ran free at last, and Selena just held her.

She felt how Kaela's body always so firm, so upright, so defiant, slowly relaxed against her own, as if the embrace were a permission to drop the weight she had carried alone since the age of ten. Selena's mind processed the information with that cold clarity inherited from the "man from the earth." Broken. Alone since ten. Separated from her only family. Different. Betrayed by the master tanner who wanted to sell her to pay his debts.

Kaela was the faithful reflection of something she now understood with painful sharpness: this world was paved with the silent losses of all the Enaras, of all the anonymous mothers who had fallen before, of all the girls who learned too soon that survival was a luxury and tenderness a risk. Selena said nothing. She had no more words for Kaela. The embrace already saturated her soul; it spoke for itself, saying everything that language was too poor to express.

She understood, at that moment of shared silence, that the mystery of the "other" Selena's identity the conspiracies, the accomplices, the death in the cabin paled momentarily against the raw reality of life in Terracanto. Against the simple, terrible truth that the women of this world died of exhaustion in laundries, or of loneliness in temporary shelters, or of nameless diseases that didn't even deserve to be baptized.

Then, amidst that realization, a thought rose above the rest, reigning absolute in her mind with the clarity of a revelation: If I don't discover the truth about who Selena was, what she was doing there, and what really happened, I will end up like them, too. Like all of them. It was brutal reality hitting her head with pragmatism. It wasn't fear, not exactly.

Furthermore, it was a cold, calculating certainty, the same one that allowed her to clean fish with the efficiency of one who has mastered a trade, the same one that made her trace her name in perfect Spanish, knowing it was a silent heresy. Survival was not a right in this world. It was a daily conquest, a battle fought in the streets, in temporary shelters, in fish markets, and in alleys where greedy eyes lurked.