“Yes.”
He clenched his jaw, picked up the pencil and wrote angrily:
“Everyone said I was imagining the pain. That I was in pieces.”
Clara felt something burning inside her.
“You weren’t destroyed,” she said, though he couldn’t hear her yet. “You were hurting. It’s not the same.”
She cared for him for days. She cleaned his wound, changed his bandages, prepared remedies with honey and herbs. And as his ear healed, something began to change in him. First, he could distinguish vibrations. Then some sounds. Later, one afternoon in the kitchen, Clara dropped a spoon and Elias jerked his head up.
I heard it.
“Did you hear me?” Clara asked, holding her breath.
Elias swallowed hard. His voice came out cracked and hoarse, as if it had been buried for years.
-Yes.
Clara let out a choked laugh that turned into tears at the same time.
His recovery was slow, but real. At night they practiced words. Clara read aloud in front of the fire, and he repeated awkwardly, determined like a stubborn and courageous child. Her name was one of the first words he tried to pronounce correctly.
—Clara.
When he finally did, he felt a lump in his throat.
-Still.
“Clara,” he repeated more firmly, and then added, almost as if he could hardly believe it, “My wife.”
That night they truly kissed for the first time. It wasn’t a perfect kiss. It was trembling, new, charged with everything they hadn’t been able to say to each other. And after that kiss, the notebook stopped being a barrier and simply became a help. Something unexpected was beginning to blossom between them.
There is no such thing as easy love.
True love.
But peace is short-lived when it is based on the humiliation of others.
A month later, Clara found a crumpled note in the barn, tucked among the tools. She immediately recognized her brother Tomás’s handwriting.
“I told you he wouldn’t dare marry. I lost fifty of them, but I can still get them back.”
The paper burned his fingers.
That night, she confronted Elias, showing him the note she was holding. He read it and closed his eyes in silent rage.
“Did you know?” asked Clara.
It took him a while to respond.
—I found out after the wedding. Your brother came to the ranch drunk and made fun of me. He said he’d made a bet with some men in town that I couldn’t bring a woman home.
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