Daniel absorbed that in silence.

For three years, a woman had moved through his house tending his coffee and his calendar, and the whole time she had been conducting, quietly and alone, a search for the brother he had buried — mothering a nephew Daniel had never known existed, on a housekeeper’s wages, in an apartment in East Los Angeles, asking nothing of the wealthy family whose name her son carried.

She could have come to him.

She could have announced herself, made a claim, asked for help, for money, for recognition.