My father did not keep his affair hidden by luck, or by being careful.

He kept it hidden by making it expensive for anyone to reveal it — by ensuring that the truth, for each of us, came at a price we could not afford to pay.

For Ernesto the price was a called-in loan, a sold farm, a daughter pulled out of school.

For me the price was my mother’s health, or so I was told, her heart stopped by a shock I would have delivered.

He found the thing each of us loved most, or feared most, and he quietly attached the truth to it, so that to speak became an act of destruction against the very thing we were trying to protect.

That is the genius of the patriarch’s silence, and it is a genuine, evil sort of genius: he does not have to threaten you into keeping his secret.