He had seen Lorena’s car parked behind one of my father’s storage units more than once.

He had even confronted my father about it, months earlier.

And my father had answered the confrontation not with denial or apology but with a piece of paper.

Ernesto opened a desk drawer and took it out and showed me: a promissory note.

He owed my father nearly eighteen thousand dollars, borrowed during a brutal winter storm a few years back that had killed off part of his livestock and nearly finished him.

“He told me,” Ernesto said, and his voice was thick with shame, “that if I kept meddling in his business, he’d call in the whole note.