And I understood, sitting there, that my grief had been real all along but aimed in the wrong direction, that I had wept for three years for the wrong man, and that somewhere I owed a debt of mourning to a good person I had barely let myself know.

Chapter 20 — November 20, 2019

The truth, when it came, did not strike like lightning.

It came the way a house comes down, one room at a time, while you are still standing inside it.

First one wall of what I believed gave way, and then another, and I kept thinking each collapse must be the last, that surely there was nothing left to fall, and then another beam would go.

I had walked into Detective Hernandez’s office already knowing the largest fact, that Santiago was alive.