Aurelio stood in the rain and understood, all at once, the size of what his pride had done.

He had been so certain, back then.

That was the thing that would haunt him most in the years to come — not that he had been cruel, exactly, but that he had been so sure, and had mistaken his certainty for wisdom.

He had looked at Araceli exactly once, at a family gathering Gael had insisted on, and had decided everything about her in an instant: her plain dress, her borough, her lack of a famous name, all of it adding up in his practiced businessman’s mind to a simple verdict — she is after the money. He had said as much to Gael, coldly, and Gael had looked at him with an expression Aurelio had never forgotten and had spent fifteen years trying to, and had walked out of his father’s house and, in most of the ways that mattered, had never really come back.

And when Gael died young, the pride that had built the estrangement calcified into something even harder, because now grief was tangled into it, and a proud man in grief will do almost anything rather than admit that the thing he is grieving is partly his own doing.