The smoke still clung to my clothes. My babies were safe, but everything else—gone.
I stood in the freezing night air, barefoot, holding my five-year-old, Luna, close. My baby, Mateo, was wrapped in a firefighter’s jacket, cradled against a stranger’s chest. The man holding him—his uniform read A. Calderon—was speaking softly to him, his gloved hand shielding Mateo’s tiny face from the cold.
