It was almost eleven when I pulled into the driveway. The house was completely dark. No porch light. No television glow behind the curtains. For a second my stomach dropped, and I wondered if Sofia had gone to stay with a friend without telling anyone.
Then I heard water.
It was coming from the back patio, where we keep the old concrete lavadero from when my late wife, Ana, and I first bought the house. Nobody had used it in years. We had a good washing machine in the laundry room.
I walked around the side of the house and stopped.
Sofia was standing at the concrete basin in a thin T-shirt and pajama pants, her phone propped on the ledge with its flashlight pointing up at the ceiling. A pile of wet clothes sat on one side of her. A bigger pile of dirty ones sat on the other. She was scrubbing a pair of jeans against the ridged stone with a bar of laundry soap, and the water in the bucket beside her was so cold I could see her fingers had gone stiff and pink.
