“Something,” his father said, “that your brother and his wife haven’t been able to find.” And in that single sentence, Alvin understood that his father, defeated as he looked, had not entirely given up.

Somewhere, hidden, was a thing Manuel had protected through all of it, a thing the people who had taken his bedroom and his kitchen and his dignity had been searching for and had not found.

And Alvin understood, too, that whatever that key opened was going to matter more than anything else in this whole terrible business.

But it was not, in the end, only the documents inside the box that mattered, though they would prove essential.

It was the key itself, and what it represented, and the fact that his father had kept it.