What stayed with her instead was the sheer, dizzying contingency of it all — how a stranger’s greed had thrown her out of one life, and a stranger’s kindness had caught her and set her down in another.

She had been, at eighteen months old, the object of two opposite human impulses at once: a wealthy man’s rival willing to risk a child’s life to win, and a poor widow willing to give her own life over to save one.

The whole of who Aracely became had turned on which of those two strangers reached her first.

It could so easily have gone the other way.

That it had gone the way it did — that she had landed in Consuelo’s arms and not in a nameless grave — was the closest thing to grace she had ever been able to believe in.

Aracely understood, hearing it, that she had not been given one mother instead of another.