She felt no shame anymore, and no hurt.

She felt something closer to gratitude — because on that rainy day she had not lost a family.

She had discovered, just in time, that she’d never really had one.

She had thought about that word, family, a great deal in the months since.

The Monteros had used it as a bludgeon and a lure both — a daughter-in-law enters this family when she learns to obey; we aren’t throwing a whole family away over one bad day; everything I did was for this family. They had said it so often, and meant by it so little, that Rafaela had nearly forgotten the word could mean something real.

And then she would think of her mother — of the small green dot she had shared in the terminal, and how it had brought Graciela, without a single question asked, from forty minutes away.