Author's note: This chapter kicked my ass. The time it took me to write it is actually ridiculous and the next update will definitely come sooner. Let me just take this time to thank you all for being so patient with me and for investing your time in this story. It means the world to me. And if any of you feel like encouraging (hounding) me to write, you can find me at jellyfishheart|tumblr. Sometimes a little nudge is necessary.

/

Santana can sense change in the feverish heat that takes over the town – it prickles her skin in the evening; alerts the hairs on the back of her neck in the morning. At night, the stars hang low and hazy, whispering in a frequency she can't quite hear.

Something perches on a precipice – she holds her breath.

And it isn't just her that seems to notice. Abuela hugs her abdomen like she has something to protect; Desi sets his video games to low volume, keeping an ear out for an unknown; her parents clock in and clock out, rotating their schedules so that one or the other is always around just in case.

She wonders if they talked about it or if it just happened, like the doily that shows up unannounced, pressed between the pages of her Bible – almost forgotten.

It's early morning when she finds it, set out on her side table like someone wanted it to be the first thing she saw upon waking, and she sucks in her cheeks at the sight. She has to; the pristine piece of white fabric glows like an omen in the mottled window light and almost forces her backwards in the tangle of dark sheets.

"Get out," she hisses with uncertainty, eyes fixed on her tainted leather book.

The doily shivers slightly as it's met with her exhale of air. She cringes.

It doesn't burn like she expects it to when she reaches out for the Bible and as her fingers break it open to the marked page, avoiding contact with the doily, she finds the book's cool to the touch.

Figures.

And then she notices a quiet pencil marked passage that hadn't been touched before. Her chest stills.

Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.

She cloaks herself in a sheet, clutching the book to her chest, and pads down the hall to Abuela's room. The lock rests near the baseboard; no longer needed with the woman slowed down by that Sharpie-covered cast.

When Santana enters, Abuela lifts her eyes from the small television set on the dresser and pats the empty half of her bed. The mattress dips as Santana joins her.

"You…" Santana holds out the Bible, catching her bottom lip between her teeth.

Abuela's eyes light up but she says nothing; only turns her attention back to the TV where contestants slap their game-show buttons on mute and occasionally fuzz up as a cloud passes by outside.

They sit in silence as someone on screen wins a prize and confetti rains down. It doesn't make sense (not the game show; they're all the same, even in Spanish) – she doesn't understand why. But then Abuela reaches over with cold hands; gives her bare leg a squeeze; looks at her like she actually knows who she's sitting with.

And for the first time, Santana feels like she's allowed to exist in her own body.

Abuela tugs the Bible out of Santana's grip and stares hard at the leather cover, tracing her thumb over the gold letters. When she glances up at Santana, her face is soft. "El amor cubre multitud de pecados. You're not lost."

Santana doesn't realize she's crying until Abuela wipes the tears away with a soft thumb.

/

Later in the morning Santana finds herself peering over a basket of dirty laundry, trying not to fall down the basement stairs, all because she made one passing comment about Desi's socks being left in a ball on the bathroom floor.

"If you don't like how I run my house," her mother said as she gathered her things to leave for work, "Then by all means feel free to take care of it yourself."

Normally Santana would weasel her way out of any kind of chore, choosing instead to lounge on her bed with her laptop on her stomach – but the look Abuela gave her this morning is still burned into her vision, appearing whenever she happens to glance at a blank wall, and she wants to be better.

She wants to be the kind of person who deserves their grandmother's love and acceptance.

So she surprises her mother (and Desi, as she snatches the bulk of his growing collection of Superman boxers off his floor) and offers to run a few loads of laundry, landing herself with a towering pile of dirty clothes in the plastic basket and a staircase that's definitely seen better days.

She makes it to the second last stair before losing her footing and toppling directly into her father.

"Dio, I'm so sorry, Papi; I didn't mean-"

He steadies her and takes a step back, fixing the sleeves of his dark button-down shirt. "I keep meaning to do something about those stairs," he says. "They're just asking for an accident."

It's only as she calms her wailing heart that she notices the warmth in his eyes and the computer behind him, whose screen flicks through a slideshow of photos. She catches a glimpse of herself eight years ago, with her arms wrapped around little Desi; the two of them covered in sand.

It was taken their last night in Miami, before the endless car ride that saw the beginning stages of Santana's carsickness.

She remembers how her parents woke her up in what seemed like the middle of the night, telling her to get in her bathing suit; Papi carried her through the hotel and out onto the beach, where she didn't let go of his hand until they saw the dolphins.

He sat with her at the edge of the water, writing short messages in the wet sand whenever the ocean pulled back. She drew him hearts. And rainbows.

And the four of them dug an impressive hole in the sand after the dolphins disappeared and it was just them and the faint stars above… They all sat at the edges of the hole, feet dangling in what Santana had called "mud-sand", laughing and laughing until Santana thought their hearts were sure to explode.

"It's good that you're helping your mother with the chores," Papi says to her, drawing her from the memory. "She's been so stressed lately, with your abuela."

Santana shifts the laundry basket in her arms. "We need a maid," she jokes.

"Your mother refuses." He rubs at his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, suddenly losing the gentle smile that was just there.

"Well." She flicks her eyes to the computer screen – it's switched to a photo of infant Desi with a bowl on his head. "I'm doing my best to help out when I can… I can do more if you think it's not enough."

He stares at her for a beat longer than comfortable and finally says, "You're doing enough, Santana. We-"

She desperately wants to slip away to the laundry room so she can set the basket down and escape his painful gaze but he pins her to the spot with his dark eyes and then his whole face switches to something calmer; something docile and almost afraid.

"I'm proud of you," he tells her softly.

Neither speaks, even breathes, for the seconds that follow – Santana's sure he must mean his other daughter, the one he's built up in his head all these years (the one he won't burn alive if he ever finds out the truth about her), and he deflates slightly, as if he's only now realizing that those words actually left his mouth.

"I-" she tries, voice catching. "Why?" His eyebrows draw together in confusion and she quickly corrects, "I mean, thank-you. I… Thank-you, Papi."

He seems too shaken to speak, so when he drops his gaze to the laundry basket she takes it as his way of telling her she should probably go put the laundry on.

She does just that.

The washing machine hums loud enough to drown out any squeaking of his office chair and she sinks to the tiled floor, fingers wrapping around the edge of the basket that sits next to her in the shadow of the hulking washing machine.

Not a single thing comes to mind except: he's going to be so disappointed.

It's only after the washing machine's run through its cycle and she switches the load to the dryer that she chances the walk back through his basement office, doing her best not to disturb him.

A part of her brain recognizes that the computer's still filtering through the slideshow screensaver but most of her attention falls on the journal in his hands, where he presses an HB pencil hard to the paper, no doubt filling the lines with those block letters she used to moon over.

Her footfall creaks the bottom step and he jolts upright, spine suddenly as straight as she's spent years wishing she could be.

"Santana?"

Shit.

"Yes, Papi?" Her heart speeds up the way it does whenever her name slips through his frowning lips and she pauses with her hand on the quaking banister, unable to turn around to face him.

He doesn't turn around either; she hears his lack of movement in the silence of his chair.

"When… Your enhancements… Did they make you happy?" he asks in a voice so small she's barely sure it's actually his.

It takes her a moment but then she hears the question beneath his words – the trembling ball of nerves question that quietly asks her, did I do the right thing?

Now she turns to let her eyes stroke a path down his stiffened back, pausing in the creases of his button-down shirt, and can feel everything he desperately wants to but can't say.

Did I do you right?

Am I a good father?

She swallows twice, unable to rid her throat of the growing lump, and does her best to steady her voice as it comes out timid and small. "They did."

On the surface, he's asking about her breasts of all things – which would seem so ridiculous and mortifying if she hadn't spent an entire night sobbing in her parents' bathroom about how her flat chest meant she'd never be good enough for anyone, let alone good enough to live.

They don't bring it up because it's not something people ever bring up, but before her father signed the medical forms he took her hand in his and made her promise that if she had the surgery she wouldn't ever try to kill herself. It was the only time she ever heard fear in his voice.

She hears the same fear now, as he finally turns his chair around to face her.

"I'm happy," she tells him, and she knows they both hear the tears in her voice but some color returns to his face and she relaxes her grip on the banister so her nails are no longer digging crescents into the polished wood.

He gives her a breath of a nod. "Good. That's all a father ever wants to hear."

The screensaver flicks to a photo of Santana in ninth grade, showing off her cheerleading uniform with Brittany and Quinn as her bookends. It's a blonde sandwich, her mother had said, and Santana was just thankful her mother didn't substitute blonde for white, like she usually did whenever they were in a particularly long line at the supermarket.

She finds herself staring at the way Brittany's arm hooks around her waist, and how Quinn stands further away than necessary, like something about her two new friends might be contagious, or just off-limits.

And now she's really in trouble, because her eyes cloud over with unshed tears at the thought of what her father would say if he knew how close she's become with Brittany, and with Quinn – if he saw the way she cracks open in the middle and her pieces fall to the sides to reveal something soft, and delicate, whenever she's around either girl.

Here she is with her own father, her father who just told her he's proud of her, suddenly filled with a suffocating fear.

She runs.

The dryer goes off but she runs up the stairs, nearly slipping as she reaches the top step, and doesn't stop running until she's tucked away in the darkest corner of her closet with the palms of her hands pressed hard to her eyes.

Even then her heart keeps running, like there's something safe just over the horizon and all this darkness only furthers the need to keep going.

/

It takes her over twenty minutes of dry silence, fingers gripping her hanging Sunday best, for the fear to simmer down in her stomach. There it lies low; burrows hot and hazy for some other time.

She crawls out the mouth of her closet – because ever since the metaphor occurred to her, she hasn't been able to stand tall in the threshold – and comes face-to-face with that doily from this morning, sitting quietly on her bedspread.

With her eyes still fuzzy from closet darkness she lets herself mistake it as a snowflake against a night sky backdrop, and like this she can pick it up; hold it so delicately; walk it over to her dresser.

She watches herself in the mirror with the doily in her hands. Her skin glows like the Aztec goddess she once let Brittany make her feel she was and her striped tank top highlights those enhancements she promised her father make her happy (or at least happy enough to ignore any tugging alternatives).

As she places the doily on the dresser she holds her own eye contact through the mirror, a staring contest that shakes both sides of the participant, and doesn't look away until the doily melts under her touch into a needle-hot piece of fabric. No longer a snowflake, she smoothes it down with the tips of her fingernails. And she knows it's not the doily, it's her; she's the one who burns under the touch of something so pure.

So she places the miniature castle Brittany gave her directly in the center of the doily; an altar that glows like candlelight at the base of her mirror.

And like this she can let out her breath – because everything settles into a calming heat that soothes the hairs on the back of her neck.

Now, barefoot in the middle of her dragon's den, she decides to pull out the number Kurt gave her the other day – the one written on a piece of Brittany's strawberry-scented stationary – and at the very least enter it in her phone's directory.

She programs numbers and chooses a ringtone (Born This Way, just because) while thinking about how loudly her heartbeat echoes around her room – like the walls truly are made of stone; like all these years she's been shutting her eyes at the end of the day deep inside a bone-cold cave.

She could make a comparison between herself and a dragon, but mostly she just finds herself remembering that book Brittany toted around for months in their childhood, the one about the dragon who slept curled up on top of a pile of treasures – and that's where the comparison falls flat because she's never been one to keep her precious things so close to her.

No; she bristles and sends them far, far away; shuts her eyes and tells herself their worth is better off in someone else's hands.

(But she's spent countless nights curled up on top of Brittany's spot on her bed, cheek pressed to the sheets where Brittany used to sleep, and maybe her treasures are just memories and wishes of things she won't let herself have.)

The shine of her black nail polish catches in the light, creating the image of talons instead of perfectly groomed fingernails, and she curses her younger self for ever thinking black wallpaper would be a good idea. (At the time all she wanted was a room that could swallow her whole, so she could stop swallowing her words whenever anyone was around.) If this is a cave then she can be a bat – strung upside-down, cocooned in a pair of slick black wings, with only the call-and-answer of sonar to guide her.

She makes a soft noise in the back of her throat, half expecting to hear something in return.

Someone slams a car door outside.

Startled, her finger slips – accidentally selecting Burt Hummel's number on her touch-screen.

"Well," she says, to break the silence of her bedroom. The word drifts through the air and lands somewhere at her feet. So she says it again, louder this time, and hovers over the call button.

/

Looking back, Desi will probably think of this as the summer no one looked each other in the eye. But it's better than the summer they all slammed doors – and the summer he was shipped to Bible camp (all he learned there was how to make a lanyard and what not to ask about Jesus).

He kind of hopes he'll be able to think of this summer as the one where his father proved everyone wrong, but it doesn't seem to be heading that way.

(It'll definitely be the summer his sister was so brave. He already knows this much.)

He's still thinking of what could possibly happen in the last few weeks of summer when he finds Santana standing completely still in the middle of her room, phone in her hand like it's a bomb she's about to strap to her chest.

She doesn't see him at first. He uses this to his advantage and lets it fully sink in, how much she's changed since school let out. She still wears her worries like a backpack full of bricks but the load's a little lighter now; her shoulders aren't so tired and she stands taller – like she's allowed to fully face the world.

He should thank Brittany, or maybe Quinn – he's not so sure who inspired the change but either way it puts a faint smile on his face. She's getting there.

The floor creaks under his sudden shift of weight and now she notices him; she spins quickly, her troubled eyes growing distant, and raises her finger at him like he's about to be reprimanded.

"Des," she says, sounding sort of breathless.

Her room is dark for an August afternoon but some light manages to sneak through the curtains, spilling onto her black duvet and seeping into the cracks in the floorboards. Some cuts a path down the side of her face, tracing her jaw line, and then she shifts and it marks her neck like a halfhearted noose.

Desi shudders.

"Can I play on your computer?" he asks her. "Mami took hers to work today and I wanted to watch Youtube videos."

She waves him over to her desk and as he settles himself in front of her laptop she sinks onto her bed, making a noise halfway between a sigh and a whimper. It's something he's sure he wasn't meant to hear so he pretends to be overly interested in some dirt on the track pad, and scratches at it with his thumbnail, only to accidentally open up whatever window she'd recently closed.

It happens to be Facebook – Brittany's profile, to be exact. He quickly checks to make sure Santana's not watching him (she's still staring at her phone) and takes this stroke of luck to explore the girl who's captured his sister's heart.

As he clicks through her profile pictures, he's made aware of how odd it is that she's been in his life since the day he was born, even accompanying Santana to the hospital to meet him for the first time, and yet he's never really had the chance to get to know her.

She's always been a blur rushing past, holding his sister's hand as they clamber up the stairs to Santana's room. He sees her in increments – a twirling skirt in the kitchen while Santana digs through the fridge; a pale hand closing the bedroom door behind them; a blonde head sticking out of a pile of blankets on the couch.

He's gotten to know more about her from the things she leaves behind: pictures of her cats dressed up in doll clothes; a motocross helmet at the door with her shoes; her Sweet Valley High box set; stories Santana slips up and tells him when she forgets there's anything to guard.

And now he's finding more and more pieces of her, in the comments left on her wall and the pages she's liked.

He always thought of her as the dancer; as his sister's best friend; as the silly girl who sometimes brought him chocolate.

But she's more (and he knew this all along, but now he can really see it) – she's popular and funny and she listens to all the rap music his mother won't let him hear. He's sure if they were the same age, he'd want to be her friend as well; want to leave her videos of drunken cats on her wall and put a smile on that pretty face.

She's whole. And now he understands how her absence made his sister fold in on herself like a flimsy house of cards.

(Part of him wants to hate her, for the mess she's caused, but her eyes are so bright in these photos that he knows she never meant to hurt anyone; least of all Santana.)

She's so vibrant that it actually starts to hurt, looking at her page – so he exits the window and is left staring at Santana's computer background: a picture of some old crumbling castle.

It's changed from the last time he was on her computer – it used to be Brittany at Breadstix, hair up in a cheerleading ponytail – and he swivels around in the chair to ask Santana what happened. But then he catches her staring at him, like it's what she's been doing all this time, and she's so cemented in her position that she doesn't even notice he's moved.

"I think I'm done now," he says quietly; skin prickling from the eerie look in her eyes.

Her lips move but the rest of her face remains frozen in a vacant expression, like she's completely hollowed out.

"Why are you so okay with gay people, Desi?" she asks.

It's one of those questions that are so full of something more that the force of them feels like an anvil on his chest and he doesn't want to answer, doesn't want to put anything else into the canyon of whatever she's thinking right now, but she's so painfully empty that he can't help needing to fill her up.

"Why shouldn't I be?" he starts, readying himself to further explain.

Except Santana cuts him off. "Do you believe in God?"

No one's ever given him the chance to believe differently. But that's not what she's really asking, right now; she's trying to tell him all the reasons why he shouldn't be okay with who she is – why his opinion has an entire book to prove it wrong – but she doesn't know that he's been waiting for her to bring this up. He's ready.

"Santana, are you human?"

Her face scrunches up in confusion but she gives him a small nod, bringing her knees to her chest so she has something to hold onto.

He nods back. "All humans were created in God's image. And He loves us all, no matter what. There's a lot of things that people try to complicate it with, but that doesn't matter, okay? You're human. God loves you. That's it. Okay? If He didn't love you, you'd probably be a spider or a fruit fly."

She laughs despite herself and he can't help but smile at the way it tumbles out: all awkward and clumsy like the hand she brings to her mouth was really a tripwire, sending the laugh stumbling over itself.

"And guess what?" he continues. She raises her eyebrows at him. "You may only have two arms, but that's because it only takes two arms to hug somebody you love. Spiders can't give hugs, you know. I think that's enough proof that you're perfect, don't you?"

"You should write a book, Desi," she says with a grateful smile, before pushing off the bed to come give him a hug.

He presses his ear into her chest, focusing on her steady heartbeat. "Maybe I'll write the new New Testament and then everyone can stop being so stupid about what it really means."

She pulls him closer, toying with his dark curls. "Where'd you learn to be so smart, mijo?"

His cheeks warm. She hasn't called him that since he was really little; back when she copied every single thing their mother did.

"I learned it from you," he says simply. It's worth it to feel her whole body smile.

/

Quinn calls later that afternoon when the sun hangs heavy in the cloudless sky and Santana is in the kitchen, perched on the counter while she waits for the microwave timer to go off.

Her hands fumble slightly as she answers the phone but she manages to get it to her ear without dropping it in the sink so there's a smile in her voice when she says hello – which, it's new, but it's a nice feeling.

"I didn't expect you to answer," Quinn says, sounding a little out of breath and quite startled.

Guilt pools low in Santana's stomach. "I got your voicemail," she says in lieu of an apology, and Quinn takes in a sharp breath. "It-"

"We don't have to talk about that," Quinn rushes out, cutting her off.

"Well, just- thank-you," Santana says, hoping her appreciation can be felt through the phone. "You should sing more in glee club."

"And risk having my throat ripped out by Rachel Berry? No thank-you."

Santana laughs. She'd missed this. "Please. She's the size of a Shih-Tzu; I could punt her down the hall before she even got close to you."

Quinn lets out a snort of laughter and immediately tries to cover it up, only to end up laughing even harder.

"Dork," Santana teases, because this is easy and she likes the feeling of only barely catching her bubbling happiness before it spills out of her chest.

"Believe it or not," Quinn says in a very matter-of-fact voice, "I did call for a reason."

"Oh really now?"

"Mhm." There's a smile in her words that manages to squeeze its way through the phone.

Santana bites her cheek. "And what exactly would that reason be?"

The microwave timer goes off, alerting her that her plate is sufficiently heated (and possibly the food on the plate, if she's lucky), but she stays seated on the counter; choosing instead to listen to Quinn's whisper-soft words while her heels bump against the cupboard doors.

"Well I ran into Brittany and her mom at the supermarket this morning," Quinn starts. (Hearing Brittany's name causes Santana's breath to catch but she forces her lungs to behave.) "I was picking up a few things for my mom and they were getting enough ice cream to feed a busload of Finn Hudsons. And Mrs. Pierce reminded me of when we all used to have those sleepovers at her house and I thought, well. We're kind of friends again, right? So why not get together? There's only a couple weeks left before school starts. We could rent a few movies… maybe dig up that old brownie recipe of yours. What do you think?"

It kind of sounds like her worst nightmare come to life – she's been doing all right focusing on only one of them at a time, trying not to complicate things with either of them, so an entire night trapped between the two of them?

"Yeah, sure," she says automatically, wondering when exactly her brain disconnected from her mouth.

Quinn squeals and Santana's reminded that neither of them really have any friends outside of each other, and apart from those suspicious dance lessons with Mike Chang, Quinn has to spend most of her time stuck at home with her mother – so as much as she wants to take back what she just said, she knows Quinn needs it.

"We could do it at my place?" Santana offers, then flushes hot as she catches the double entendre.

"You sure? I mean with your parents and grandma it's-"

"Yeah." Santana rolls the palm of her hand against the edge of the counter, eyes fixed on the blinking microwave clock. "My dad's going to Cleveland for a few days so we could have the bottom floor to ourselves, if we do it Friday. My mom has a late shift and I could probably bribe Des to stay upstairs."

"Cool, yeah. This is going to be fun."

She can hear Quinn's grin through the phone and it feels almost good, agreeing to this. But she knows it won't be as simple as just throwing on some cheesy movie and hiding behind a bowl of popcorn – Brittany has a ridiculous knack for reading people and she'll probably guess what happened the moment she sees them in the same room.

"Yeah," she says finally, wincing at the sigh in her voice. "The Unholy Trinity Reunion Tour."

/

When she returns upstairs with a cooling plate of last night's dinner, her bed is made and the pillows at her headboard are fluffed up like in a magazine spread. She pauses in the doorway, nearly stumbling backwards at the sight. She always means to make her bed, but she spend so much time burrowing in the sheets that it seems sort of pointless to make it look nice when she's just going to mess it up again.

So this – this drenches her with confusion. Until she hears the shuffle-tap of Abuela and the one crutch she's taken to using coming up behind her in the hallway.

"You're so messy," Abuela says as Santana turns to face her. "You and Nicola… Every time she's over the place looks like a pigsty."

The empty name drips cold down Santana's spine as she realizes this isn't a conversation meant for her. She grips the edges of her plate harder, taking a step back so the doorway separates the two of them.

"Do they not clean, at her house? Those hippy-dippy parents of hers know nothing about how to raise a child," Abuela continues, her fingers tying invisible knots in the air between them. "Always sending her over here, like your good manners will rub off on her. And how's that supposed to look for us? The whole town thinks they're cuckoo. We're the only…"

Suddenly her voice drops off and her face shifts into a startled expression, eyes growing distant and wet.

"Abuela?" Santana sets her plate down on her dresser and reaches out to touch her grandmother's arm.

The woman trembles at the touch and stares in confusion at the cast on her foot. "What am I… What is this? Santana?"

"Let me take you back to your room, Abuela," Santana says in a controlled voice, trying not to let the fear slip through.

Abuela nods and Santana puts an arm around her, slowly leading her down the hall. She forces herself not to think about how small and insubstantial her grandmother feels under her arm because this is the woman who taught her to jump rope when she was a little girl. This is the woman who sang her Spanish lullabies whenever she had a bad dream. She doesn't want to have to see her abuela as anything other than strong.

Her throat is raw and aching by the time she sits her abuela down on the bed and the tears finally come when she presses her lips to Abuela's forehead in a fierce kiss. She can't get out the I love you she wants to, but she thinks Abuela knows as she pulls back and meets her eye.

It's the second time that day she's crying in her grandmother's bedroom but this time the hand that cups her face can't stop the feeling of the rug being yanked out from underneath her.

Everything has shifted and she just really needs her mom.

/

Because the world just doesn't want to throw Santana a bone, her mother calls to say she'll be staying late at the office and needs someone to make dinner for the family. What she's really saying is she needs Santana to take on the mother role, which isn't unusual but hasn't happened as frequently since the summer started, and Santana has no choice but to assure her mom she'll take care of it.

Mrs. Lopez only stays late when there's something to be avoided at home. Santana doesn't want to know what's happened now between her parents, so she takes a roast out of the freezer to defrost and heads back upstairs with the intention of distracting herself with loud music and the wonderful world of Sims.

She's nearly at her door when she notices her parents' door is half open and the slowly sinking sun illuminates the room from the west-facing window.

It glows.

She's always obeyed the unspoken rule of staying out of their room, but something draws her in and she's perched on the edge of their bed before she knows what's happening.

The last time she was in here, she was on the floor near the dresser, hugging her knees as her parents told her Abuelo passed away. She'll never forget that sick, haunted look on her mother's face – it was the moment she realized what exactly the loss of a loved one does to a person.

(She remembers at his funeral, gripping Brittany's hand so tight it hurt because she couldn't get out the words to say how desperately she needed to know she wouldn't lose her. She wanted her and Brittany to be like Abuela and Abuelo – only she didn't know it at the time; she only felt the urgent tug of longing deep in her stomach.)

She stares at the spot on the carpet where her life once came to a complete stop – they've since remodeled the room, changing everything from the furniture to the wallpaper, but she swears she can see the imprint of her younger self burned into the ground.

The memory propels her off the bed and she's on the floor in seconds, hugging her knees like she's young again. She looks up to where her parents had sat on the bed – her father was wearing a sweater that day, she remembers; he used to wear soft things before his world hardened – and though the room is empty, something does catch her eye.

There's a stack of photos on her mother's side table, half behind a picture frame that showcases the day Santana lost her first tooth.

Curious, she heads over and carefully removes the stack of photos without disturbing anything else on the table. She doesn't want them to know she's been in here.

The first photo is of her mother, years before she had kids. Her hair is loose and frames her smiling face and Santana can see the resemblance between them, but she mostly sees Desi's mischievous eyes. Part of her wonders if her mother was just as sneaky smart as him when she was his age. But then she flips through to the second photo and her heart stills.

It's her mother again, only younger and hugging a girl who looks exactly like Santana. She sees her own mouth caught between a smirk and a laugh; her own nose wrinkling as her cheek touches her mother's cheek. And her eyes – these are definitely her dark eyes; wide and desperate to hide the fear that bubbles up inside.

She doesn't need to turn it over to see what's written on the back. She knows this is Maci. This is her aunt. And she was beautiful, and so sad. Santana can almost feel the sadness surrounding her in the photograph.

"Who's that?"

She jumps out of her skin, nearly tossing the photos up in the air as Desi appears at her side. By the startled look on his face she guesses he assumed she knew he was next to her but she's really considering putting a bell on that collar he insists on wearing because he's too damn good at sneaking up on people.

"Who is that?" he repeats, climbing up on the bed so he can get a better view. "She looks like you."

Santana sinks down on the mattress next to him, angling the photo so they can both look at it. "That's Mami's sister," she says quietly.

He seems to catch the somber tone of her voice because he shifts a little closer to her and glances up at her with big eyes. "I didn't know she had a sister."

"She died before we were born," Santana tells him, wondering if she has the right to say any of this when she only knows tiny scraps of the whole story. "Her name was Maci. Abuela…"

"I can see why she confuses you," he says. He touches the photo with a careful fingertip, brushing against Maci's long dark hair.

"Mami doesn't like to talk about her."

He rests his head against her shoulder and lets his hand fall against her thigh, warm on her bare skin as he presses his palm flat against her. "If you died I don't think I'd like to talk about you either. You can wear out a memory like a video tape and I'd just… I wouldn't ever want to forget you. So I'd just think about you a lot and only say your name when I was praying."

She wraps an arm around him and pulls him closer to her body, unable to speak. His curls are soft as she runs her fingers through them and he always used to protest to this when he was little, but she'd do it until he fell asleep and she knew he never really hated it.

He lets out a whispery sigh and she presses a kiss to the top of his head in reply.

"This family's got a lot of secrets, huh?" he murmurs.

Santana glances down at the stack of photos in her hand and decides she'll put them back without rifling through the rest of them. If memories do wear out, she doesn't want to use up what her mother has left of the sister who took her life so long ago.

"I think there's a lot that's just better off staying in the closet," she says in a quiet voice, immediately catching what just slipped out.

Desi catches it as well and she can feel the disappointment in the sag of his shoulders. "Stuff stays hidden if it's bad or painful. You're not bad, Santana. I know you're scared, but… what if you didn't have to hide anymore? What if you could just be who you are all the time?"

He isn't expecting an answer so she just gives his shoulder a slight squeeze and stares into the guarded eyes of the aunt she never knew.

They stay in their parents' room for awhile, until the filtered sun drips from the dresser to the carpet, and it isn't until Santana's removing the roast from the oven that she wonders if she actually might know more about her aunt than anyone.

/

Her mother comes home long after her father's gone to bed. The house is silent and mostly dark, save for the dangling lightbulb above the kitchen sink.

Santana had every intention of washing up after dinner – but she's still sitting on the counter, watching soggy Cheerios float around a bowl from breakfast. When she hears the creak of the front door opening she sucks in her cheeks and listens to her mother's heels click across the hall.

"Santana, you scared me," her mother says quietly as she pauses in the kitchen doorway.

Her dark hair is still pulled back in a tight bun from work but a few strands have managed to escape and hang in her face, enhancing the exhaustion lining the skin around her eyes.

She isn't really scared, or even startled; what she means is you shouldn't be awake this late but Santana tilts her chin upwards in slight defiance and holds her mother's gaze until those tired eyes break away, finding a scuffed spot on the floor to focus on.

"Papi went to bed," Santana says in a ghostly cold voice.

Her mother lets go of whatever last thread of strength she'd been holding since the morning and glances up at her daughter with searching eyes. She seems to find what she's looking for because her posture straightens up and she tightens her grip on her purse, and in the shadowy doorway her face is all cut up from the dim light above the sink – and Santana doesn't want to see the uncertainty slip through for the second it does but she can't look away, either.

"We need milk," her mother says with a clipped force to her words. "Get your shoes on; we're taking my car."

Santana slides off the countertop and pockets her phone, but hesitates as she crosses the kitchen. "Mami? It's nearly one. Can't this wait 'til morning?"

"We need milk, Santana."

Her tone of voice leaves no room for argument so Santana slips her feet into the first thing she finds by the door, a pair of bright yellow rain boots that remind her too much of Brittany, and finds her mother in the front seat of the car, holding her keys like the world is ending.

They drive slowly, and quietly; streetlights fondle the car with their outstretched beams and Santana watches her reflection in the window; watches her eyes flick from light to dark with each passing beam. She can't remember the last time her mother drove her anywhere. The vacuum silence of the car is a comfort.

A slight breeze has picked up by the time her mother pulls into the parking lot of the twenty-four hour supermarket and Santana rubs at the goose bumps on her arms, focusing on the sound of her rain boots trudging against the asphalt.

At the mouth of the store, she feels small enough to crawl into the front of the cart.

The place is empty and her mother's heels click against the tiles with an importance that sets her teeth on edge. She wants to say something, but her mother looks so washed out under the fluorescent lights that she just ends up grabbing onto the side of the cart like she did when she was young and matches her clomping rain boot pace with her mother's tiny heels.

They're quite a pair, she thinks, as they pass the dairy section without grabbing a single item.

"Do you remember when you started getting those nightmares?" Her mother breaks the soft silence between them with an even softer murmur.

Santana keeps her eyes on her rain boots. "You'd take me to the porch swing, and sing to me."

"Your father was the one who insisted on that swing," her mother says to their empty cart. "I thought it was a waste of money, but he insisted."

They turn down the cereal aisle; when they were kids Mrs. Lopez wouldn't even let them look at the cereal because it was all sugary crap, she said. The first time Santana slept over at Brittany's house they had Lucky Charms for breakfast and she decided her own kids would never have to suffer because the good stuff costs more.

Now, she eyes the rows of chocolate marshmallow sugary sweet boxes and immediately finds herself searching for something plain; something cheap and in a box that doesn't make her teeth hurt.

"Thanks for being the mom that you are," she says suddenly, almost tripping over her boots as she turns to look at her mother.

Mrs. Lopez tucks a stray strand of hair behind her ear, a gesture that makes Santana's heart ache, and focuses on the gentle way her fingers grip the handle of the cart. "I asked you to go easy on me, when you were born. I was so scared of doing the wrong thing. Every mother is, I think. But you were a good baby. Sometimes I think about how tiny you were; how you always used to press your face into my neck."

"Is it hard, watching your kids grow up?" Santana asks.

"In a way. You have to let go of the idea that you have any say in who they are, and you realize that you've somehow managed to raise these independent people. These real, human people who have opinions and beliefs that won't always match your own."

Mrs. Lopez takes a hand off the cart to brush a few stray hairs out of Santana's eyes.

"That one pesky piece," she says with a laugh, and continues with her previous train of thought. "But it's good; it's a good thing when you can see that the little babies you diapered and fed are now people you can sit down and have a conversation with."

Santana chews on her bottom lip, lost in her thoughts.

"You make that same thinking face," Mrs. Lopez says all of a sudden, almost afraid of her own words. "As Maci. I see so much of her in you."

"I'm sorry," Santana says quietly.

Mrs. Lopez shakes her head and steers them down the junk food aisle. "It's not a bad thing. I just worry… I'm just afraid of the world getting to you, the way it did to her. I couldn't stand…"

Santana trails her fingertips across a shelf of soda bottles and thinks of the photo she found earlier; the arm her mother had wrapped around Maci looked harmless, at the time, but the more she pictures it in her head the more it seems like an act of protection. Her mother was the anchor but sometimes the sea is too strong.

And it all feels like such a sharp knife to the heart: first she lost her sister, then her father, and now her mother's going as fast as the sun sets in December.

"I'm not going anywhere," Santana promises. "You don't have to worry about me, okay Mami?"

Her mother stops the cart in front of the pet food and it rolls slightly as she jerks away from it, nearly knocking Santana over as she pulls her into a crushing hug.

"Oh, Santana. I want you to get as far away from this town as you can. Don't you ever look back, mija. You just go and forget about all the shit you hear from these people. It's poison. The world's so much bigger than Lima, baby. You need to know this. You need to get out of here before it kills you."

Santana presses her face into her mother's neck and breathes in the sharp scent of perfume and spices she'll always equate with love.

"How come you didn't get out?" she asks. "Why didn't you leave?"

Mrs. Lopez only pulls her daughter closer and begins to cry, standing in front of the jumbo bags of dog chow. It's bitter and lonely and the lights buzz too loud for the middle of the night – and Santana's toes are bruised from the rain boots, the stupid scuffed rain boots, but she links her hands behind her mother's back and remembers when the fact that her fingertips couldn't touch forced her to believe that her mother would go on forever.

They don't get any milk that night. They don't buy anything that night, and when Santana sneaks downstairs after her mother falls asleep, she opens the fridge to find a full carton of milk right there in plain sight.