Mrs.

Vasquez was the workaround.

In their planning, Kai had never once been a boy who would lose his mother.

He had been a logistics problem with a solution already sourced.

I understood then that whatever Blanca was, it was not that she lacked feeling; she clearly loved her son, in her ruined way.

It was that her circle of the human had a hard edge to it, and everyone outside that edge — Alyssa, Ines, me, my child — was scenery to be arranged around the two of them.

That is a thing far colder than rage, and far harder to forgive, and I did not intend to try.