I watched the words land on everyone at once, watched my parents’ faces change, watched the man at the center of it all realize that his mother had heard me and believed me, or at least believed me enough to ask.

There is no putting a question like that back once it has been spoken.

It hung in the air with a weight that pressed us all down into our seats, because every person in that room understood, in the instant she asked it, that if my scar was real and Santiago was alive, then a body had been buried under the wrong name, and a real person had died a real death that no one had ever properly grieved, and the ground of the family cemetery held a lie.

Teresa had cut, in a single sentence, straight to the bottom of it.