The girl sat at her window sill, hugging her knees to her chest and tracing
a heart on the frosted window. Snowflakes slowly drifted past her gaze,
falling ever so gently to join the white, unblemished blanket that covered
the pavements. Curfew time had fallen. The evening sky was slowly
darkening, and lights around Tejer were flicking on as people sat down to
their looms and began their work in a fluid, almost simultaneous motion.

Kate had never known her real parents. She had been found, bundled in a thin,
grey material, coughing from the harsh cold winds of a Tejer winter, at the foot
of a government building, where the young Señor Blanco, fresh from his days in
an English university, had found her, and brought her home to his delighted
Spanish wife, who had been longing for a child for years, to no avail. Kate
loved the couple she called her parents, but sometimes when she was alone she
would rest her hands on the loom gently and think about the man and woman who
had brought her to this world. Were they from Tejer? And why –the unsaid
question burned Kate’s tongue and heart- why had she been abandoned?

The heart she had traced an eternity ago on the window had been filled up and erased from its easel. Kate got up, abandoning the work she had been doing, and sat on the windowsill again, as she tended to do whenever thoughts of her real parents occurred. Gently and quietly she retraced the heart, and thought, Do they love me? She shook her head violently to get rid of the ugly thought. It felt like
black ink –negro, the colour of the Guezón’s heart, the colour of their
intentions, the colour her papá’s face got when the Guezón troubled him- seeping
through the pristine white snow, disturbing her.