I sat in my uncle’s kitchen and understood, then, that my father had not merely hidden a mistress.

He had built a machine of silence around himself, financed with money and fear, and bought each of us into it with whatever currency we were most vulnerable to.

Ernesto, with a debt.

Me, with love for my mother.

He knew the price of every person in his family, and he had paid it, and we had all, every one of us, taken the money.

I have thought a great deal about that machine of silence, because it was so much more sophisticated than a simple secret, and because I think most families that go rotten go rotten in something like the same way.