June 1987 Three days since he arrived. He had stopped expecting to wake up in his own room.

Riley lay still for a moment, staring at the wooden ceiling, listening to the sound of a world that didn't belong to him.

A rooster somewhere. Children already playing outside. The smell of garlic rice frying from another house.

He sat up slowly.

Miguel's house was small but clean. A plastic calendar on the wall. A framed photo of the Last Supper above the door. An electric fan that wobbled every time it turned left.

Riley had slept in the room of Miguel's younger brother, who was away visiting relatives. Nobody asked too many questions. That was the thing about people from this era, Riley thought. They just... helped. No suspicion. No hesitation.

Miguel appeared in the doorway holding a plate.

"Have you eaten??" he asked, already setting it down on the small table without waiting for an answer. Garlic rice. A fried egg. Two pieces of hotdog.

Riley stared at it.

His mother used to make this exact breakfast.

"Thank you," he said quietly.

Miguel waved it off and leaned against the doorframe. "So. You never told me where you came from."

Riley picked up the fork. "Far away."

"Family?"

Riley was quiet for a moment. "...Just me."

Miguel studied him the way people do when they know there's more to a story but choose not to pull at the thread.

"Well," he said, "you can stay a few more days. My mother won't mind. She likes feeding people."

Riley almost smiled. My grandmother.

He hadn't even thought about that.

They were walking to the market later that morning when Riley saw her.

He didn't know it was her at first.

She was across the street, laughing at something her friend said, covering her mouth with the back of her hand the way people do when they laugh harder than they meant to. She was wearing a plain yellow dress. Her hair was down. She looked like someone who had never carried a heavy thing in her life.

Riley stopped walking.

Miguel bumped into him from behind. "Hey, what happened to—"

Then Miguel stopped too.

And Riley watched his father's face change.

It was subtle. Just a few seconds. But Riley had grown up watching this man sit quietly at the dinner table after a long day, watching him stare at old photographs, watching him light a candle on a specific date every year without explaining why.

He had never seen his father's face look like this.

Open. Unguarded. Like a window with no curtain.

"Miguel," Riley said carefully. "Who is that?"

Miguel blinked. Cleared his throat. Looked away.

"Nothing. Nobody." He started walking again.

But Riley looked back across the street.

The girl in the yellow dress was still laughing.

And something in Riley's chest cracked open — not from sadness, not yet — but from something he hadn't expected.

Relief.

She was real. She was here. She was so alive.

He had spent years trying to remember her voice and some mornings he couldn't. He had spent years looking at the same three photos they had of her because there were only three. He had spent years carrying a version of his mother that was small and fragile and tired and sick.

But this woman across the street —

This was not that version.

This was Melissa before the hospital. Before the diagnosis. Before she whispered things to a God she was bargaining with at three in the morning thinking her children were asleep.

This was Melissa when she was just a girl in a yellow dress, laughing too hard at something her friend said.

Riley turned away before she could see him staring.

He pressed his lips together.

Hi, Mom, he thought. You look so beautiful.

He kept walking.

He didn't say another word the rest of the way to the market.

And Miguel, walking beside him, was also very quiet.

Both of them thinking about the same girl.

For completely different reasons.