Helena had a stroke in December.
Not a severe one — the doctors used the word mild, which Camila had learned in her nursing studies was a medical description of physical severity and said nothing about the experience of it, and which Helena received with the specific disdain of a woman for whom mild was not a category she accepted applying to herself.
She was at the Lapa house when it happened. Alone, which was the terrifying part. The housekeeper found her on the sitting room floor with her face doing the asymmetric thing, the telltale, and called the ambulance before calling Leonardo, which was exactly right and which Leonardo thanked her for specifically, because his instinct would have been to call him first.
Camila was at the nursing school library when Leonardo texted. She left wi
