That movement was worse than any scream. It told me the room had trained her — that she’d been waiting for the next thing before the next thing even happened.

Then she saw me. “Mother?”

Her mouth trembled. There was a dark mark near her wrist beneath the soap foam. She tried to smile. It broke on her face.

Andrés turned around. For a second, he looked startled. Then he looked offended, as if the problem was not what he had done, but who had seen it.

“How disrespectful,” he said. “Now your mother enters my house as if it were a market?”

Doña Rebeca adjusted the pearls around her neck. “No wonder she came out so spoiled. You raised her to believe herself a princess.”