A man can memorize a hotel room number.

He can rehearse the facts of a broken wrist until they sound like memory.

He can school his manner into his brother’s quiet patience.

But a laugh comes up from somewhere below all of that, from the oldest and most involuntary part of a person, and it cannot be rehearsed, because it happens faster than thought.

Santiago had spent three years becoming Sebastian in every deliberate way, and he had done it well enough to fool a family.

But he could not change the sound that broke out of him when something was genuinely funny, because that sound was not a decision.