And not to just any man, but to the identical twin brother of Santiago, my first husband, the man I had buried after a crash on the highway, the man I had mourned until mourning had worn a groove in me so deep I thought I would never climb out.

I told myself I had climbed out.

I told myself this was the climbing out.

I was wrong about that, too, though not in any of the ways I feared.

Chapter 2 — Two Men With One Face

To understand any of what follows, you have to understand the twins, and how two men can be built from what looks like the same set of parts and turn out to be nothing alike.

Santiago and Sebastian Morales were identical.

The same height, to the centimeter.

The same dark eyes, the same voice, so alike that on the phone their own mother sometimes could not tell them apart.

As boys they had traded places to fool teachers, and even as grown men, standing side by side, a stranger could not have said which was which.

But I was not a stranger, and to me they had never for one instant been the same, because a face is not a soul, and the two brothers wore their identical faces over entirely different men.

Santiago, my husband, was loud and quick and gloriously charming, the kind of man who could walk into a room of strangers and leave twenty minutes later with three new friends and a dinner invitation.

He was a jokester, a charmer, a person the light seemed to follow.

Sebastian was his opposite in everything but appearance: reserved, patient, quiet, a man who listened more than he spoke and thought before he answered.