The ballroom broke into stunned whispers.

Aracely felt the floor go out from under her.

For thirty years she had lived with a hole no answer could fill — a beginning she could not see, a question she had made her peace with precisely because she believed it could never be answered.

And now the impossible was kneeling in front of her, weeping.

There is a particular vertigo to being recognized after a lifetime of being no one’s.

Aracely had spent her whole life as a person without an origin — a girl found in a fire, raised by a woman who was not her blood, married to a man who was ashamed of the little she could account for.