And it was that same discipline, honed in places these champagne-drinking guests could not have found on a map, that let her stand under this chandelier holding her infant daughter and absorb a deliberate public humiliation without giving Sabetha the one thing Sabetha actually wanted, which was a reaction.

They thought they were watching a nobody take her medicine.

They were watching a professional decline to be provoked.

There is no way, from the outside, to tell those two things apart — and that confusion, that exact confusion, was the whole of the trap Marisela had not yet fully seen the shape of.

Chapter 3 — Her Father’s Rule

There was a principle Marisela’s father had pressed into her when she was a girl, and it came to her now, whole, the way the important things do.