She sealed the box and put it high on a closet shelf, and she thought about the day, years off, when she would take it down.

Alma would be old enough by then to understand — twelve, maybe, or a little more, the age when a child starts to sense that the adults around her are people, with histories, who made choices.

Marisela had turned over, more than once, whether she would tell it at all.

It would have been easier to let the whole thing stay buried, to give her daughter a clean childhood unshadowed by the knowledge of what her father and grandmother had once tried to do.

But she had decided, finally, that easier was not the same as better, and that a girl was owed the truth of her own life.

She would tell it carefully, and at the right age, and without cruelty — she would not raise Alma to hate anyone, because hatred was just one more way of letting Sabetha keep a grip on the family from a distance.