Chapter 1 — The Threat at the Table

“If you say the word Harvard in this house one more time, I’ll pull you out of school tomorrow and send you to load boxes in a warehouse.”

Seventeen-year-old Santiago listened to his Aunt Griselda with his head bowed and his hands flat on the table, because he had learned long ago that arguing only led to shouting, and shouting only led to worse, and that the shortest road to a quiet night was to say nothing at all.

So he said nothing.

He looked at the grain of the old table and he waited for the storm to pass, the way he had waited out a hundred storms in the years he had lived under his aunt’s roof, and he did not let his face show the one thing that would have enraged her most: that inside, where she could not reach, the word she had forbidden him to say was still burning like a coal that would not go out.

Chapter 2 — The Cemetery in the Rain

That night, as a storm flooded the north of Mexico City, Santiago walked to a cemetery in the borough of Gustavo A.

Madero, and knelt in the mud before a headstone, clutching a folder to his chest as though it were the only warm thing he owned.

“Dad,” he said.

“I did it.

I got into Harvard.

A full scholarship — everything covered, tuition, housing, all of it.

I got in.” The rain ran down his face and he let it.

“But Aunt Griselda says there’s no money for a passport, or a visa, or the plane.

She says I should stop dreaming, that people like me don’t go to places like that.” His voice cracked.

“I asked her about Mom’s insurance money — whether there was anything left, anything at all, to get me there.

She hit me for asking.

Dad, I’m so tired.