It was shaped like half a sun, handmade decades ago, and Consuelo had given it to her before she died.

“You were found after a terrible fire, thirty years ago,” the old woman had told her, weak in a hospital bed at the end.

“You had a burn scar on your collarbone, a fever, and this necklace closed up tight in your little hand.” Those few things were the only clues Aracely had ever had about where she began — a fire, a scar, and half a silver sun.

She had worn the necklace every day of her life since Consuelo had pressed it back into her palm at the end and told her to keep it close.

As a girl she had turned it over and over, tracing the faint marks on the back she could not read, inventing stories to fit them — a princess, a shipwreck, a family across an ocean who wept for her.

As a woman she had stopped inventing and simply worn it, a small warm weight against her collarbone, the one physical thing in all the world that had traveled with her out of the life she couldn’t remember.