The thing I had to do about Bea took me a year and it was not about her mother at all.

In the February, at a family dinner, my aunt Perpetua — who is eighty-one and who loves that child — looked across a table and said the sentence.

The one she has been saying since 2015. Ay, this one is her mother all over again.

And I said, out loud, in front of eleven people: “Tía.

Stop.

She isn’t.

She’s Beatriz and I want that to be the last time anybody in this family says that to her.”

It was horrible.