“You knowingly lied.

Write that.” And he stared at her, and took the pen, and wrote the truer, harder word.

Chapter 20 — A Basket of Strawberries

A month later, my mother called a formal family meeting, and we sat around the dining table — my father, my mother, Mariana, Ernesto, and me — and my father, who had learned by then at least the shape of an apology by then, offered a real one.

He apologized for the affair, for the money, for forging her name, for using her blood pressure to frighten me into silence, for using Ernesto’s debt as a leash.

“I cannot undo what I did,” he finished.