The children gathered against the wall with paper bags and winter coats.
The volunteers worked on the production tape, in the light of the fluorescent lamps.
And there, at the central table, sat a woman in a denim shirt with sleeves rolled up to her elbows, cutting sandwiches on triangles with precise, skilled hands.
He recognized her before he could even take a good look at her face.
The attitude was different, the body grew, signs of life were visible in the shoulder position.
But something remained unchanged in the calm focus of his movements, in the way he turned around.
Answer the child without interrupting the rhythm.
When he finally looked up, Isaiah felt that twenty-two years had melted away in one impossible second.
She was older than the girl he meant, but she was exactly the same as her.
“Victoria,” he said.
She looked at him kindly, just as she would look at a stranger who somehow knows your name.
Then he heard the first thing that came to his mind, the one that emerged from the depths of his past.
“You’ve always said square sandwiches seem small to you, so you cut them into triangles when you want them to look bigger.”
The knife stopped in his hand.
She looked at him.
