The crash thirty years earlier had not been chance — a business rival of Lysander Fairholme’s had tampered with the car, and in the chaos and the fire that followed, a feverish toddler with a burn on her collarbone had slipped into the public hospital system and out the other side, unnamed, unclaimed, lost.

Consuelo Aguilar had found her there.

Consuelo had taken her home.

Consuelo, who had almost nothing, had given her everything, and had kept her alive.

The man responsible had died years before any of this came to light, which Aracely found she could accept.

She had no appetite to build the last third of her life around the punishment of a ghost, any more than around the punishment of Damson.