That request disarmed the old man more completely than any reproach could have.

From then on, they ate together every Sunday, just the family, and Aurelio told his grandson about Gael — how the boy had hated to lose at anything, how terribly he had sung, how he had once wrecked the family car learning to drive and spent a month too ashamed to touch a steering wheel, how he had fallen in love with Araceli precisely because she was the first person who ever told him, to his face, that his famous surname did not impress her in the slightest.

And one Sunday, Aurelio confessed the thing he was most ashamed of.

“I drove them apart,” he said.