For three months Rafaela had said yes.

Every request had come wrapped in the language of family: you’re one of us now; family helps family; we’d do the same for you. And she had wanted so badly to be one of them that she had heard those words as an invitation rather than a con.

She saw now that they had never intended to do the same for her.

There had never been a version of this arrangement in which the money flowed the other way, in which the Monteros gave her anything but instructions and bills.

They had looked at a generous woman who wanted to belong, and they had seen not a daughter but a resource — a thing to be tapped, managed, kept just happy enough to keep paying.

The cruelest part was not that they had used her.