Consuelo had been the whole road.

A woman with a food cart and a two-room house had looked at a feverish, unclaimed child in a public ward — a child who came with nothing, who might have been anyone’s or no one’s, whose people were surely coming or surely dead — and had decided, without hesitation and without any hope of reward, to make that child her own.

There was more love in that single decision than in most of the fortune Aracely was now heir to.

Lysander Fairholme had given her a beginning, and she was grateful for it beyond words; the ten years of his searching moved her every time she let herself think of it.

But Consuelo had given her a life, and taught her how to live it, and the necklace that finally reunited her with her blood had reached her only because a poor widow had thought a scared child worth keeping.

The two women had never met.