“It wasn’t lost today, Dad,” I told him.

“You started losing it the moment you decided to lie to everyone.” He had no answer to that.

He was learning, slowly and too late, that there are some losses no one can be talked out of, because you inflicted them on yourself a long time before the bill arrived.

And then, when I thought the worst was over, my father did the thing that told me he had understood nothing.

As the story spread through our small town, he began, to save his own face, to tell people that Mariana had turned me against him — that my wife had orchestrated all of it to get her hands on the family property.

The lie reached the elementary school where Mariana taught.