I knew that scar the way you know the handwriting of someone you have loved, instantly and in my body before my mind could even form the thought, and the knowing turned me cold from the scalp down.

Because I had seen that scar made.

I had cleaned the wound that became that scar.

I had changed the bandages over it, for weeks, with my own hands.

And it did not belong, could not belong, to the man standing in front of me, because it was Santiago’s scar, and Santiago was three years in the ground.

I stood there with my earrings on the nightstand and my new husband half-undressed before me and felt the floor of the world go soft, and I understood, without yet understanding anything, that something was catastrophically, impossibly wrong.

I want to describe what that instant actually felt like, because it was unlike any fear I have known before or since.