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Alma allows herself to stay in bed a few more minutes. To keep her eyes closed and the day’s responsibilities at bay. To imagine that Pedro is beside her, or perhaps already up and bustling around. Her Pedro was always more of a morning person than her. Not that she lets anyone know it - Alma gets up early every day, and always makes sure she is presentable. Strong. Because Pedro isn’t here, but their children are, and so are the other people who depend on the miracle. Sleeping in might be nice, but it is not very conducive to getting things done.
She sighs and throws off the blanket. The door to her closet flies open, and she still has her eyes mostly closed while getting dressed. But by the time she leaves the room her hair is brushed and pulled up, earrings put in, dress immaculate. She wears a smile on her face like armor.
As she makes her way down to the kitchen, Alma knocks on Bruno and Pepa’s doors, barely pausing in her stride for Pepa’s but having to walk up a few steps to Bruno’s. She hears no reply from her children, but that is expected. They are not morning people, and don't actually have to be up for a little while longer.
Julieta is already in the kitchen, of course. Alma finds her debating over what to make.
”Good morning, mamá,” she greets.
”Morning, my darling. What are you considering for today?”
”Sugar cookies? Or I could make bread again.”
”I’m sure cookies will be lovely.”
None of the villagers ever complain about what Julieta makes for them, but she still gets nervous about it. Alma starts on breakfast for the family while Julieta bakes. They don’t talk much, just work quietly side by side, but it’s nice.
Twice, Alma has to scold both Julieta and Casita about how Julieta should not be standing on the footstool while it moves. Casita doesn’t move it around very quickly, and Alma has never seen Julieta fall, but the rule is there for a reason. A few weeks ago Pepa was climbing on the railing and fell down. Casita caught her before she could hit the ground, but it still left Alma’s heart racing long afterwards.
Sometimes she thinks Casita is teaching her children bad habits. She is glad that they feel safe, that they are safe, but a railing outside of their house would not be able to unwind itself to catch a falling child.
To be fair, footstools in other kitchens also don't move around to spare children from walking a few steps on their own two feet.
Julieta probably won’t be needing the stool much longer. Bruno and Pepa already don't, but Julieta has always been the shortest.
”Go fetch your siblings,” Alma says as she puts down the last breakfast plate on the table. Julieta disappears, and Alma uses the moment alone to consider what might be on the day’s agenda.
She and Julieta will go to the town square to hand out the cookies. It will be the second time this week, and they will probably go once more later in the week. Maybe twice. Julieta already wants to go every day, and part of Alma wants that too, but there are many other things that must also get done.
After lunch the children can work on their reading and writing. That can be a challenge, because while the children are the same age and have always had the same teacher - Alma herself - they are still on different levels. Bruno could lose himself in a book for hours. Pepa, on the other hand, tends to get restless and frustrated. And a frustrated Pepa means rain on the book, which hardly improves things. Bruno often offers to read to his siblings out-loud, and sometimes Alma lets him, but Pepa needs to be able to do it herself.
If the schoolwork goes well they can take a walk around the encanto. If there is any trouble Alma and Julieta would hear about it earlier in the day. That’s usually when people approach Alma with important things she needs to know, local gossip she is not actually that interested in knowing, and requests for Pepa and Bruno’s gifts. A party that would be better in the sunshine, a field that needs more rain. Pepa isn’t very good at controlling her gift yet, but the people are patient while she learns. And Pepa’s siblings are a great help, making her laugh and focus on them rather than pushing too hard to make it sunny and getting nervous rain instead.
The requests for Bruno are harder to field. Sometimes people have a specific question, and Alma can try to figure out if it is appropriate for her eight year old son or not. But vague questions about the future are harder. Earlier in the year Bruno took a ”is something going to happen this weekend?” from a mildly curious villager who mostly just wanted to experience Bruno’s gift for herself, and stumbled across a vision of the woman’s husband being unfaithful.
(That’s one of the reasons Alma tries to be the middleman between Bruno and the people. Her son, lovely boy that he is, tends to blurt things out. Alma can take the time to edit the answers, if she thinks they’ll be too upsetting. Or at least deliver them with a bit of tact.)
And in the evening, they will have dinner - perhaps even inviting someone over for the meal - and then…
Julieta returns with Pepa.
”Mo-orning mamá,” Pepa says, the first word half swallowed by a yawn. She’s still in her nightgown with sleep-ruffled hair. Alma and Bruno tend to be awake fairly quickly once they manage to drag themselves out of bed (no matter how much they might struggle with that first step) but Pepa almost falls back asleep in her beans and rice some mornings.
”Is your brother still asleep?” Alma asks, torn between her own breakfast and going to drag Bruno up.
”I didn’t see him,” Julieta says. ”I think he’s further in.”
Well, that decides that, then.
”Don’t worry about it, darling. I’ll find him.”
The new rooms the miracle gave to her triplets are amazing, but sometimes impractical. Especially Bruno’s room. The stairs seem to get more steps with each passing year, and they change with his moods. When Bruno is upset and wants to hide away alone, the stairs get longer and steeper. Alma often climbs them anyway. Sometimes there is a value to letting those who want to be alone be alone, yes. Alma learnt that the hard way when she tried to touch Pepa in the middle of an episode. But she’s fairly sure what Bruno needs is to know he isn’t alone.
Fairly sure.
Sometimes Alma feels like she’s structuring her whole life around trying to keep Pepa and Bruno calm. But isn’t that a parent’s job? To keep their children calm and happy?
She opens the door to Bruno’s room. His bed is still close to the door, but empty. (Sometimes the bed, or some of his things, disappear further in. Often he doesn’t seem to know where they are, and gets frustrated trying to find them. Alma doesn’t know what it means that Julieta and Pepa’s rooms seem so perfect for them, made for their comfort and able to change to their will, when Bruno often complains about his and seems to have little to no conscious control over it.)
Alma starts climbing the stairs. They seem especially long. Alma tells herself it is just because she hasn’t had breakfast yet.
Did Bruno have a nightmare? He could have come to her, if that were the case. He often does, much more often than Pepa. Certainly more often than Julieta, who hasn’t come to Alma’s room in the middle of the night for years now.
At the top of the stairs she finds the vision chamber. Alma helped him establish it, to have a single place to do his visions. He sometimes does them in other places, both within and outside of his room, but they don’t take him by surprise as often as they did in the beginning. He usually has to consciously look to have one now. Alma hopes the vision chamber is helping.
Bruno is curled up on the sandy floor of the chamber, sitting with his back to the door and knees pressed to his chest. He is very quiet.
Alma deliberately makes her steps loud as she walks up to him. He doesn’t respond, doesn’t look up. There is a slate of green glass on the floor in front of him. Alma carefully sits down next to Bruno and even more carefully puts an arm around his shoulders. In the glass, a man is lying in a bed, surrounded by other people.
Alma has a bad feeling about this.
”What did you see?” Maybe she shouldn't ask. But she needs to know. How can she help, if she doesn’t know? And if her little Bruno has to see terrible things, the least she can do is be there to listen and comfort him.
Bruno shudders.
”There’s a man,” he starts. Takes a shaky breath, as if seconds away from bursting into tears. ”He dies.”
And her little Bruno saw it. Saw it alone, possibly over and over. He often gets stuck in vision loops if he sees something that scares him, especially if Alma isn’t there to pull him out of it.
All of her children know about death. Knows what Pedro did for them, if not all of the traumatic details. Alma doesn’t like to talk about what happened, at least the part before the miracle came, but she made sure they would know.
She knows they have seen small, dead animals. Birds with their heads removed by one of the stray cats, that kind of thing. And they have watched her get dressed for funerals down in the encanto sometimes, even if they are too young to attend the ceremony themselves. (They won’t be too young much longer. Not with the people already looking to them as an example. But Alma makes sure everyone always looks to her first. That they know her word is law, and not to bother the children behind her back.)
Bruno is eight years old. It is natural that he knows about death. And he probably is old enough for a funeral. But he shouldn’t have to watch someone die.
Alma can still see Pedro falling, if she dares to think of him with her eyes closed. He was her husband and best friend and the father of her children, not some stranger who’s name she doesn’t know. But even if it was a stranger, if it wasn’t as bloody - it’s still not something Bruno should have seen.
She doesn’t know how to put it into words. How to comfort him. But she has to do something, has to seem like she knows everything and can make it all better. She pulls Bruno into her lap and holds him tight. He starts crying, near soundless but shaking. She can feel the tears on her shoulder.
Alma doesn’t cry herself. She never cries where her children can see it, and only very rarely alone. That night, with Pedro, she’d cried and screamed. But after… She was busy. She had to be strong. And it always kind of felt like, if she started crying, she might completely fall apart and be unable to put herself back together again.
There is no Pedro to stroke her hair and promise her that everything will work out. There is no Pedro, because the world is cruel and people die and the miracle saved them all (all but one) but sometimes it makes Bruno see terrible things. Things that lurk behind his eyes when he closes them, the way Pedro’s death hides behind hers. Ready to trap her in grief.
But Alma is alive. She strokes Bruno’s hair, and she murmurs comforting nonsens, and she sings lullabies he normally considers himself too old for. She holds her son, and it probably isn’t enough, but it’s something.
Eventually Bruno runs out of tears. She eases up on the hug to look at him. He slumps right back into her arms, as if ready to fall asleep.
”Breakfast, Brunito,” she decides. ”You need to eat something. Or at least have some water.”
He mutters something she can’t quite make out into her shoulder. It’s clearly a complaint, but not a particularly strong one.
”Come on, up,” she insists. ”You can take a nap on the couch afterwards. I’ll sit with you.”
He doesn’t protest again, but he also doesn’t get up. Alma manuvers until she can stand, carrying him in her arms. She remembers when he was born, how his head could fit in one of her hands. It won’t be long until she can’t carry him anymore.
She only makes it a few steps until she has to face the fact that while she can still carry an eight year old, she probably shouldn’t do it down long sets of stairs with a terrifyingly steep drop to one side. She’s sure the magic would not allow Bruno to come to harm, she would not let him sleep in this room otherwise, but looking over the edge still gives her vertigo.
Right. No carrying Bruno down the stairs, then. She wishes she could ask Julieta or Pepa to bring them some food, but there is no way to talk to either of her daughters without leaving the room first. She sighs and sets Bruno down. He stays on his feet, and doesn’t cling to her again. She grabs one of his hands, and he grips back a little too hard. A little desperate. She doesn’t mind.
They go down the stairs together, and through the rest of Casita. She sits Bruno down at the table, and he finally lets go of her hand. The table and food are wet. Pepa looks slightly sheepish.
”I didn’t manage to save the food in time,” Julieta says, looking just as sheepish. Alma doesn’t know if it was Julieta that upset Pepa somehow, or if she just feels responsible because food was involved. ”But the cookies just got done. We can have them instead.”
They probably have some bread put aside, or Alma could make something new. But sugar cookies with Julieta’s warm healing in them is probably just what Bruno needs right now, and it might cheer up Pepa as well. And to be perfectly honest it doesn’t feel out of place for Alma herself.
”That would be perfect, thank you Julieta.”
So they have cookies for breakfast. Julieta and Pepa make conversation, but don't try to pull Bruno or Alma in. Neither of them ask what Bruno saw, even if they must have guessed he had a vision. Nothing else rattles him this way.
By the end of the meal Julieta puts aside the remaining cookies in a basket to take down to the people, and it’s only then that Alma realizes that she’s promised to be at two places at once. She looks at Bruno, who’s still quiet and has dark bags under his eyes that look out of place on his young face. Even if he’s just going to sleep, she said she would sit with him. She has to be there if he wakes up. And Pepa also looks like a second indoor rainstorm could strike before lunch.
”I’m sorry, Julieta.” And she is. Kind, responsible Julieta gets put aside for her more needy siblings far too often. Alma knows it, worries about it, but never knows how to stop it. ”We can’t go in with the cookies today. Perhaps tomorrow, instead.”
Julieta’s face falls. Alma thinks she will nod and try - badly - to hide away her disappointment. But then Julieta straightens up.
”I can just go alone,” she says. ”It’s not far, and everyone is always nice. And the other children go out to play by themselves all the time, even ones much younger than me.” But the other children in the encanto are going to play, not deliver healing. And what if the people who usually take this time to ask Alma for Pepa or Bruno’s gifts direct those questions to Julieta instead?
And, slightly less innocent of a concern: if Alma allows Julieta to go out and help people with her gift by herself, Pepa and Bruno might demand to be allowed to do the same thing. And they are more fragile. Pepa needs someone to keep her calm. Bruno needs someone to draw him out if he gets trapped in a vision. Trying to explain that they have different needs only goes so far against a set of siblings' innate sense of what is fair.
”No, Julieta,” Alma says, voice firm. And again, she expects that to be the end of it. Julieta is the responsible one. But this time she doesn’t back down.
”We told people yesterday that I would be giving things out today,” she insists. ”We said I would be there.”
”And sometimes things change.” Alma can only barely keep her tone from turning into a snap. She sees a raincloud growing in the corner of her eye, and instinctively wants to turn to Pepa. But that’s part of the problem, so she keeps her gaze locked on Julieta.
”You should both go,” Bruno mumbles. ”I’m okay.”
Julieta immediately looks guilty. ”No, I didn’t mean…” she trails off.
”No-one is going,” Alma insists. Both because staying with Bruno is important, and because she made a ruling and doesn’t want to go back on it. Doesn’t want the children - even orderly little Julieta - to believe that arguing with her is the way to get what they want.
”Señor Pérez migraines will be back,” Julieta says. ”And there’s some sort of virus going around the children. It’s not serious, nothing I can’t handle, but if they don’t get the cookies a lot more people will get sick. It will mean more work later. And everyone will be at the square today, waiting. At least let me go and leave the basket, and tell them we’ll come back with more tomorrow.”
That’s an unfortunately good argument. Alma feels herself start to give. She stands behind Pepa and starts to comb through her hair, both to calm Pepa down and to give herself time to think.
”And it’s not a lot of cookies,” Julieta continues, perhaps sensing that she’s got a foot in the door. ”If I handed them out, rather than just leaving the basket, it shouldn’t take more than an hour. It would reassure people that everything is fine.”
No. Alma has to stand by her line at least in some ways. And the longer Julieta stays at the square, the larger the risk that someone tries to press her on things they really should talk to Alma about.
”You can leave the basket,” Alma reluctantly agrees. ”But-” and here she raises her voice slightly, when Julieta breaks into a wide smile ”-you need to come back right after. If anyone asks you tell them that something came up, and that I might come by the square this afternoon, but that there is no guarantee. You tell them the plan is to deliver more food tomorrow, but you make no promises. Understand?”
”Yes, mamá. I promise!”
Julieta’s smile is blinding. Casita pushes the basket to her, and out she goes before Alma can change her mind.
”You should have just gone with her,” Bruno tries again. ”It’s important.”
”So are you, Brunito. Drink some more water, and then you can lay down.”
Bruno does as she says, which is somewhat of a relief. When he lays down on the couch, Alma pulls up a blanket around him and sits down in a chair. She gestures for Pepa to sit down on the floor in front of her, and spends a few minutes braiding her hair. It’s comforting to have something to do with her hands, simple movements and a task that does not require thoughts. The cloud over Pepa’s head goes away. She ties off the ends of the braids. Kisses the top of her head.
”Go get dressed, Pepa. It’s far too late for sleep-clothes.”
Pepa goes to her room, Julieta is probably half-way to the town square, and Bruno isn’t asleep but at least he’s resting. Alma takes a moment to rest too, sitting up and with her eyes open, but resting nonetheless. It’s hard sometimes, just to find moments to breathe. To do something other than handle a crisis, or plan for the next few hours, or just trying to hold everything around her together. To not think about Pedro, but also not not-thinking about him. The idea of forgetting even more painful than the act of remembering.
Alma sits, listens to Bruno’s breaths slow down into sleep, and tries not to think at all.
It takes her far too long to realize that Julieta really should have been back by now.
Nothing is wrong, she tries to tell herself. Julieta stayed to hand out the cookies after all, and I will tell her off for it, but she’s not in any danger.
Alma sneaks away from the couch, careful not to wake Bruno. She knocks on Pepa’s door and opens it moments later. Pepa, now fully dressed, looks up from something she’d been working on - a drawing? - and Alma tries not to sound either worried or angry as she tells Pepa to go sit with Bruno.
”Is something wrong?” Pepa asks anyway, a rain cloud already forming.
”Nothing is wrong,” Alma says, perhaps too firmly. ”Just sit with Bruno so he doesn’t wake up alone. You can keep drawing. I’ll be back soon.”
”Okay, mamá.” Pepa still sounds hesitant, and the cloud doesn’t go away. She gets up anyway. Alma should say something to comfort her, should pull her into a hug, but she doesn’t have time. She smiles and puts her hand on Pepa’s shoulder to guide her back to her brother. The cloud gets a little darker. Alma hopes that Pepa’s not about to wake Bruno up with a rainstorm. But Bruno won’t mind if she does, Alma knows. Bruno has always been good at calming Pepa down. True, sometimes he’s the one setting her off with a careless word, often by mentioning he saw a vision of a storm and immediately made that vision a reality as Pepa worried. But he would also make jokes and funny faces, distract her by telling wild stories made up on the spot. Sometimes, when Alma is stressad, she finds herself snapping at Pepa to just calm down. It’s stupid, both because she doesn’t want to take that tone with her children and because it always makes things worse rather than better. She has never once heard Bruno do the same thing. He’d be more likely to try to insist he enjoyed the storm, and that Pepa had made him happy by getting his favorite book all wet, rather than show the upset he must be feeling.
Alma leaves the casita. She does not run towards the town square, but she might admit to walking in a quick and determined way.
She stays calm, and focused, and there is nothing panicked about the way she scans the crowd for her daughter. There aren’t too many people about, but Julieta is so short. That must be why Alma can’t see her. And Julieta’s not standing in their usual place - nor is the basket there - but she must have just decided to use another corner today.
Alma walks around the square, once, twice, three times. No Julieta, no people standing in line to receive cookies, no basket. She starts asking people if they’ve seen her, trying hard to sound calm and collected. Julieta is a child breaking a rule. She is missing, but only temporarily. She’s not gone like Pedro. Like the man who Bruno saw in his vision this morning.
The man in the vision.
Alma comes to a sudden stop. The day feels a bit colder. Bruno had a vision of a man dying in bed. She doesn’t know the details, but people who die in bed surrounded by family tend to be sick or injured. And little Julieta went to the square, where everyone knew she would be handing out healing food today. Julieta went here with her cookies alone. Julieta, with her big heart, always wanting to help. Julieta, already upset that Alma had wanted her to come back home rather than doing more for the people.
Someone asked Julieta to come to the man’s house and cure him, Alma is sure of it. And Julieta is going to fail, or be too late, or something. Bruno saw the man dying in a vision, and Julieta is going to see it in real life because Alma let her go alone. Julieta is going to feel responsible.
Alma hasn’t really sat her down to talk about how there is always going to be people who die, even with the miracle. She should have, she knows that now. Julieta is always trying to take on more responsibility, heal more, and Alma is so proud of her that it hurts. But this is a lesson Alma herself hadn’t truly known that Julieta would have to learn. She has done absolutely nothing to prepare her, and that seems stunningly irresponsible now. No doctor goes out thinking they can cure death itself. But that’s not as obvious to an eight year old with miraculous healing powers.
Alma needs to find her.
She should be staying calm, not make a scene. But she needs to find Julieta now and that is more important. Alma climbs up to stand on the rim of the fountain in the center of the square.
”Everyone!” she calls, loudly. Watches as people stop to stare at her. ”My name is Alma Madrigal. You know me, you know my daughter Julieta. She came here alone today, and she went to a house to help someone. I need to know which house.”
People start to mumble to each other, some shrugging. Alma clenches her teeth so she won’t scream at them to just tell her where her daughter is. Most of them probably won’t know. But if even one of them does, it will be quicker than trying to run around knocking on every door in the encanto.
(But she will knock on every door if she has to, and damn what people think. Right now, she just wants Julieta safe in her arms and she doesn’t care how it happens.)
Someone does know, it turns out. An old lady gives her the address. Alma jumps down from the fountain, and she starts off walking in a quick and determined way, but the last few streets she’s running.
She throws the door open without even knocking, without even stopping to check an extra time that she's truly in the right place.
”Julieta!” she calls, and maybe there is just a hint of panic in her voice. Julieta doesn’t answer, but a young woman appears from a room further in the house. She isn’t anyone Alma knows, but probably still a teenager. Her dark hair is braided and her face shifts from grief to fear when she sees Alma.
Alma Madrigal is the leader of the encanto, the protector. The one they turn to for all sorts of help and advice, who lives in a magic house and has magical children. She wants people to trust her. Not to be someone they fear. But right now Alma would physically fight this teenager to get to Julieta if she had to.
”Where is she?” Alma demands, and she doesn’t recognize the sound of her own voice. The cold fury.
”In there,” the girl says, pointing to the room she came from. ”We just wanted…”
There is no time for excuses or explanations. No time to be kind, to try to sympathize with a family who is desperate and grieving. Alma rushes past the girl, elbows her way through other people in the room until she reaches the bed.
The man in it is very pale, and his eyes are closed, but he is still breathing. Slow, loud breaths with a wet hacking sound to them, like the man would cough if he had the energy. He will clearly not live much longer, but he isn’t dead yet.
Julieta is by his side, tears streaming down her face, trying to force a cookie into the man’s mouth. He doesn’t cooperate. It won’t matter. Julieta’s healing is becoming stronger, and maybe one day the miracle will actually let her heal something as serious as this. But not today. Today, Alma needs to take Julieta far away from this dying man and the misplaced guilt she is all too sure her daughter will feel.
”Julieta,” she says, and she grabs Julieta’s shoulder. ”Time to go home.”
”I can heal him!” Julieta insists, but her voice is wavering.
”No, you can’t.” Alma doesn’t like to speak about the limits to the miracle, especially where people outside of the family can hear her. But she has always known there must be limits. If they could truly be granted any wish, Pedro would have returned to her side long ago.
”If he would just eat…”
”Death is a part of life. It’s painful, and hard - impossible - to accept. But it’s still true. People die, even here in the encanto. They always will.”
Part of Alma is speaking to the grieving family. To their friends and neighbors whom they might spread this story to. Another part of Alma hates that she can’t focus fully on her daughter without trying to manage the people and their rumors at the same time.
She uses her free hand to pull the now half crumbled sugar cookie from Julieta’s grasp.
Slowly, step by step, she manages to pull Julieta away from the man. The basket of cookies stays on the bed. Alma doesn’t care. Let the dying man’s family try to force feed him cookies if they wish, as long as Julieta is not there to see it fail.
When they leave the house Julieta doesn’t make it more than a few steps before she sinks to the ground, shaking with new tears.
Little Julieta, the kind and responsible one. The one too often put aside because she wasn’t in trouble. Alma considers sitting down by her side, holding her like she had held Bruno this morning. But there are already people lingering around them in the street, trying not to be obvious about their staring. Julieta should be away from them all, able to grieve alone. Not having to smile or put on an act.
Alma bundles Julieta in her arms and carries her all the way home. People stare, and some call out questions that Alma doesn’t answer, but the crowds part for them.
They get back to Casita. Alma’s arms want to shake by then, but she does not let them. Can’t let Julieta think that she has to walk on her own. Alma is her mother. Helping Julieta and her siblings, fixing their problems, is her job.
Bruno and Pepa meet them at the door. They both look worried, and Pepa’s rain falls on them all.
”What happened?!” Pepa demands, while Bruno bites his lip like he knows. Like he’s also finding ways to blame himself. Julieta and Bruno, always acting like things are their fault. They forget that Alma is supposed to be the one protecting them from things like this.
She carries Julieta up to Alma’s own room, Bruno and Pepa following behind like ducklings. Alma’s bed is big, and when she first saw it she felt bitter that the miracle would give her a bed that was clearly made to share with Pedro. But now it means she can bundle all three of her children into the same bed, and still have room to lay down beside them.
She feels Pepa’s rain on her cheeks, like the tears she can’t cry anymore. For once, she does not tell Pepa to calm herself.
The world is cruel, and unfair. She tries to put it into the right words, give some sort of advice to help her children make sense of it all. She hardly knows what she’s saying. Something about death being part of life, maybe, like she’d said in the dying man’s house.
Death is a part of life that Alma would rather go without. She doesn’t want to explain it. Doesn’t want the children to understand it, for it to be more than an idea, like one of Bruno’s stories.
Pepa is the first to fall asleep. The rain stops, and she snores softly into Julieta’s hair. It takes longer for Julieta and Bruno to follow, but they do in the end.
Alma stays with them for a while. Imagines staying for hours, just laying down in a small room with her family.
But there are other things that must be done.
She carefully slips out of bed, congratulating herself on managing not to wake the children. She makes herself presentable and goes back out to the encanto.
Already, she is writing her speech in her head. She will stand up, maybe on the fountain again to make it seem like the first time had been a more deliberate choice, and address as many of the people as she can.
My family was granted a miracle, she will say. And my children magnificent gifts. Every day they use these gifts to help people, and they put their whole hearts into the effort. But they are still children, and sometimes they do not know their own limits. Never ask one of them to come to your house alone again. You can ask me what can be done when you see me. You can even send word to our home, if there’s an emergency. But if you cannot trust me and the lines that I draw, then the encanto is not the place for you.
No, she can’t say that. Her family is not the only one that has found safety here, and threatening to throw anyone out would be cruel. Worse, it might turn people against her family. Maybe even against her specifically. Alma isn’t worried for her own sake, but if someone desperate got it into their head to push Alma out of the picture so they could control her children instead…
Her speech needs to be more carefully worded. But she will make it. She will stand up, and she will draw the line. No matter what happens, she will protect her family.