It would be OK.
But then, as Lisa was getting out supplies for her Spanish classroom, her return to daily routine suddenly crumbled.
Someone was running up to her, screaming. Her neighbor's daughter?
Nothing made sense. Lisa heard the girl say Lucas was not breathing. An ambulance had taken him to the hospital.
Lisa started to cry and ran down the hall. She raced home to get her husband - but why was Alejandro talking to the police?
At the hospital, the doctors asked if Lucas had been in an accident. Did someone shake him? More stern-faced police arrived. And then her baby was being helicoptered to a bigger hospital 80 miles away.
Six days later, he was dead.
And the doctors and police believed that one of his parents had killed him.
A romance abroad
Lucas seemed like such a healthy baby.
He had chubby, dimpled cheeks, a soft hint of a smile. He had blue eyes from his mother and a touch of gold in his skin from his father, a native of Costa Rica.
That's where Lisa and Alejandro had fallen in love.
Lisa, a junior-high Spanish teacher in State College, was chaperoning a group of students on a 10-day "eco-tour" of the Central American nation. Alejandro was their guide.
They didn't hit it off so well at first.
The burly, smiling guide greeted the young teacher warmly - too warmly, she thought. Reserved by nature, the tall, slender woman was unsure of his intentions and gave him a frosty greeting in return.
Talking to his bus driver later, Alejandro rolled his eyes. Ten days with the standoffish schoolteacher.
"It's going to be a long one," he said.
But by the end of day two, she started to smile at his jokes. After the children went to sleep at the hotel, the teacher and the tour guide stayed up for hours, talking. She liked his lighthearted nature, and how children seemed to gravitate toward him.
Later that year and the next, the two flew back and forth to visit each other.
