It filled the way a dry riverbed fills in a flood — all at once, overwhelming, more than the banks could hold — and Aracely stood in the middle of it and could not tell, in that first moment, whether she was being saved or swept away.

Millicent could barely speak.

“The accident,” she sobbed.

“We were told no one survived.

We buried an empty coffin.

We mourned you for thirty years.”