There was a service.

There was a small stone with her name on it, over nothing.

And I, ten years old and already fatherless, was taken in and raised by an aunt who did her best with a grief-shattered child.

I grew up.

At twenty-one I met Alejandro, and he built me a life so comfortable that I could go whole weeks without remembering the girl I had been.

But I never entirely stopped wondering about that night — about the fire that left no body, about the mother who had gone into the smoke and never come out.