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Lucía and the children are lying on the sand.Tomás is slotted into one side of her body and Rosa into the other. Like two soft organs, easily removed. They smell of salt and of grilled corn.Tomás is complaining about the book Lucía bought him.‘Benjamin goes for a ride in his spaceship and runs out of fuel. He makes an emergency landing on an asteroid and sits down to wait...’‘I hate it,’ he says.‘Why?’ Lucía asks.He shrugs and furrows his brow.This is a tic he has; he does it several times a day.A tiny but vital movement, the way the diaphragm expands and contracts with every breath.The fireworks are already over. Only the Russians are left, their brash voices carrying in the air as they try to salvage some rockets which, instead of exploding, belch thick black smoke. A while ago, the children started coughing and Lucía moved them to the next stretch of beach along, where they found a small mound of sand likely carved up by a quad bike. Lucía sat down and leaned back against it.She is on the verge of falling asleep.The last of the rockets drop onto the sand with a dull thud, colourless and broken.Tomás says he can tell a better story than the one in the book. He opens it and pretends to read: ‘Benjamin leaps into the abyss. He plummets into a deep hole of freezing water and is instantly immobilised.’‘Who taught you the word immobilised?’ Lucía asks. And what does Tomás do? He shrugs.Rosa is asleep. Before dropping off, she’d askedwhere her dad was. ‘He had to stay home and work,’ Lucía replied. Rosa stared at her, as if searching her face for some other answer. Then she gave a huge yawn, her gaping mouth wide enough to fit a clenched fist inside.It’s the Fourth of July.The fireworks started at around 8 p.m. when it was still light. ‘I don’t see anything,’ Tomás complained, shading his eyes with his hand as he searched the sky. Once it grew dark, the entire shoreline of Miami Beach was filled with lights exploding into more lights. People sat on the sand clutching bottles of beer and eating food out of tins. Lucía had brought juice boxes along for the children, and champagne for herself. Plus, some organic grapes that Rosa fancied in the super- market and then later didn’t want.They’d cost almost as much as the champagne. Around 8.30 p.m. Rosa spotted some corn on the cob being grilled at the pool bar, went over, ordered three and told them to charge it to the room. She was more than capable of looking after herself in hotels. She had not yet grasped basic multiplication – according to what one Miss Fox had written in her latest school report – but she knew the sixteen digits of her mommy’s credit card off by heart.