“Call the police,” Carmen announced to the windows. “This woman has assaulted me.”

Lucia took out her phone.

“I’m calling.”

Carmen’s smile weakened.

“Don’t be ridiculous. Give me the boy and we can forget this happened.”

“You just asked someone to call.”

Lucia gave the address, described the attempted removal of her child. And admitted she had slapped Carmen. Saying it aloud made shame rise hot beneath her collar. She kept speaking.

“We’re still in the courtyard. There is a car waiting outside.”

The rear door closed.

A woman from the ground floor, Ines, stepped out in slippers. She had watched Mateo grow up and occasionally accepted parcels for Lucia.

“Bring him inside with me,” she said.

Lucia hesitated. Mateo was clinging to her coat.

Ines crouched at a distance.

“We can sit just inside my doorway. Your mother will be right here.”

He looked up at Lucia.

“I’ll stay where you can see me,” she promised.

When he finally moved toward Ines, Carmen called after him.

“Tell them what your mother did.”

“Do not put him in the middle of this,” Lucia said.

A man descended the stairs carrying a phone. Javier lived on the second floor. Lucia knew him mostly through brief greetings and complaints about the broken lift.

“I recorded part of it,” he said quietly.

Carmen turned on him.

“You recorded her hitting me?”

“I started when you shouted that you were taking the boy.”

For the first time, Carmen had no immediate answer.

Daniel arrived before the officers. He rushed through the gate, saw his mother’s cheek, and stared at Lucia.

“What have you done?”

“Ask her why there was a car waiting.”

“You hit my mother.”

“Yes. I did. Ask her why.”

Carmen gripped his arm.

“I came to give Mateo his coat. She attacked me.”

There was no coat in her hands. No shopping bag. Lucia looked at Daniel until he noticed it too.

“Where is it, Mum?”

“In the car, obviously.”

An officer entered the courtyard and asked everyone to stay apart. The other went toward Ines’s doorway, where Mateo sat beneath a blanket.

Lucia could hear her son asking whether his mother would have to leave him.

For the first time since the slap, she nearly broke.