For two weeks I tried to keep the surface of my life smooth, and I failed, because Mariana can read me the way she reads her small students, and she knew something was eating me alive.

One afternoon she overheard the end of an argument between Ernesto and me behind the garage.

That evening she came into our room, closed the door, and looked me in the eye, and asked the direct question I had been dreading.

“Is your father seeing someone else?”

And I could not lie to her face, so I told her everything — the midnight visits, my father’s threats, my uncle’s debt, all of it.

And then, because she deserved all of it and not just the convenient parts, I told her the worst thing, the thing I was most ashamed of.