Ines the second.

I was meant to be the third.

“And Kai?” I asked.

“He was never part of it,” she said.

“We had never chosen a woman with a child before.” That was what Mrs.

Vasquez had been for — an old acquaintance willing to take in a newly orphaned boy, while Dario played the shattered stepfather too grief-stricken to raise a child that wasn’t his, and signed my son off to distant relatives along with the estate.

What struck me, listening to her, was that she spoke about my son the way you might speak about an unexpected line item — a complication in the arrangements, a thing that had required a workaround.