She had built her identity the way you build a house on land you don’t own: carefully, lovingly, and with the private knowledge that the ground beneath it was borrowed.

She had told herself the not-knowing didn’t matter, and mostly she had believed it, because the alternative — to spend your life aching for a family that was surely dead — was a way of drowning slowly, and Consuelo had taught her to swim instead.

But now a weeping old man was on his knees calling her by a name she had never heard, a name that had apparently been hers before she could speak, and the borrowed ground was turning out to be solid after all.

She had a beginning.

It had been there the whole time, engraved on the back of the necklace she pressed when she felt small, waiting thirty years for the one person in the world who could read it.

The hole did not fill gently.