It was that her surviving child had made her weep for three years over the wrong coffin, had let her carry the specific unbearable grief of burying Sebastian while telling her she was burying Santiago, had stolen from her even the truth of which son she had lost.

He had not only taken his brother’s life.

He had taken his mother’s right to grieve the right child.

There is no ledger cruel enough to hold that.

And underneath Teresa’s grief ran a guilt that she did not deserve and could not shake, the guilt of a mother who felt she should somehow have known her own child.

She would say it to me, in the hard months afterward, in a small broken voice: how could I not have known?

How could I hold my son’s hand and not feel that he was the wrong son?