Dangerous.
The next weeks become a pattern.
By day, you scrub marble floors, polish silver, fold sheets, and disappear whenever guests arrive. By night, you enter Alejandro’s room with towels wrapped around the braces so they do not clink against the furniture.
You help him stretch.
You help him stand.
You massage his legs when cramps make him bite down on a towel to keep from crying out.
You read physical therapy exercises from old medical books he kept hidden behind novels.
Sometimes he curses you.
Sometimes he curses himself.
Sometimes he says he cannot do it, and you say, “Then we stop for tonight, not forever.”
Slowly, something impossible begins to happen.
His legs respond.
Not fully.
Not easily.
But enough.
The first time he takes one step between the wheelchair and the bed, he nearly falls. You catch him, both of you crashing against the mattress, breathless and shocked.
Then he starts laughing.
Not politely.
Not bitterly.
Laughing like the sound has been trapped inside him for three years and finally found a window.
You laugh too, covering your mouth so nobody hears.
He looks at you, still smiling.
“María,” he whispers.
You blink.
He has never said your name like that before.
Like it is something gentle.
“What?”
“I took a step.”
“You did.”
“I took a step.”
“You did,” you say again, smiling so hard your face hurts.
His eyes shine.
And in that moment, you forget the mansion.
You forget the uniform.
You forget the family that sold your future for eight hundred dollars a month and called it gratitude.
For one perfect second, you are simply two young people kneeling on a bedroom floor, staring at a miracle nobody else believed in.
