The glass came down, and Santiago, without a thought, threw himself between me and it, shoving me clear with his whole body so that the falling shards caught him instead of me.

Most of it he escaped.

But one long piece opened a gash along the lower left of his hip, deep enough that it needed tending for a long time afterward.

We were young and stubborn and short on money, and I cleaned that wound myself, at our own kitchen table, and I changed the dressing over it every day for weeks while it slowly closed, and I watched it heal into a pale curved scar shaped like a fishhook.

I had traced it with my fingers a hundred times in the years of our marriage.