More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
His voice was like coming home.
Growing older felt like holding water in cupped hands; the harder she pressed her fingers together to keep life with Néstor the way it used to be in her grasp, the faster it slipped away.
“Or something like that,” she said, squeezing his hand back.
Nena was his home. The one thing on earth more precious to him than his own life.
He had been foolish enough to make his home another person once before. He would not do it again.
Nothing worth wanting came easy; nothing worth wanting was ever given to men of dust and sweat.
“Beautiful mare. Well proportioned. Intelligent face. Why, is she for sale?”
Lol
He knew, with the acute awareness of a much older man, that there were some things too precious to lose. That so many things—his dignity, his work, his very world—meant nothing. Not when Nena lived. The only purpose of tomorrow was to survive it and to reach her on the other side. And nothing—not Don Félix, not Don Feliciano, not his own cowardice—would stand in his way.
He feared that he was nothing to her. That if he offered her his heart, she would take it and drop it in the dust to bleed whenever her father called. That alone meant Nena could shatter him, mind and soul.
He loved looking at her. He wanted her to be the last thing he ever saw, the first thing he ever saw, his heavens and his earth.
Nena. She was his Nena, lovely and perfect and real and here.
There was no woman on earth like this one.
“I couldn’t face it,” he said. “A world without you. I am not brave enough.”
“But when I came back, and I saw you, I knew,” he said softly. “My home is with you. It always will be.”
Hope lit his features from within. “Then don’t cry, mi nena. We’re together, and we’ll always be,” he said. “That alone is a miracle. You are my miracle.”
He crouched, and drew another circle of salt, this time directly around Nena’s sleeping form. He stood inside it, over her, his arms folded over his chest, the bag of salt clutched in one hand. There he stayed until dawn grayed the eastern horizon.
This. Man.
She would give it up. For home was this person behind her.
