“It’s a lie. The truth…” Lucy shook her head back and forth like an animal caught in a trap about to chew off its paw. “The truth…”

“Lucy—”

“The truth will kill me.”

Now Flix did lean forward, took her free hand in his, noted how damp it was with cold sweat. “Guapa, this is me. I could never be there for you when you were young, but I’m here now. I won’t let anything happen to you. This I swear with all my heart and soul. Please tell the truth now. You must see that keeping it to yourself is what’s killing you.”

Lucy stared at him with eyes swollen with tears and years of unknown heartbreak. “Maybe you’re right, Tío. It’s why I slipped into drugs, then fled the house.” All at once, her fingers gripped his with a terrible ferocity. “It was…” She choked, pulled back, and then with an enormous show of courage, pressed forward. “It was my father. Mama didn’t protect me against him. She knew all about it. She knew and did nothing to protect me.”

“Wait a minute, your father abused you and my sister knew?”

Reacting to the shocked look on his face, she said, “She was terrified of him—and of you.”

Flix found himself reeling. “Me?”

Lucy nodded. “She was afraid of what you’d do to him if she told you.”

“Damn right. I would have—”

“And landed in the stockade? Court-martialed? Jailed for life?”

Lucy’s voice sounded to him like the oracle of Tikal, her words like a chant or a prayer, as if it were coming from another plane of existence, one he could not ever have imagined until this dreadful moment. Not in his family. Never. “Aiii!” Flix clutched his head, which felt like it was about to explode.

“Tío, por favor. Tío!”

Setting aside the necklace, she pushed herself into his arms, holding him as he had wanted to hold her, comfort her, protect her. But how could you protect someone from the past? It was a task far beyond him. Still, they clung to each other like survivors of a shipwreck, which, in a very real sense, they were.

“She loved something about that shitbag, though God alone knows what it was,” she whispered in his ear.

Flix knew she was right, but that knowledge only caused the pain to burrow deeper inside him, like a worm intent on feasting off him. In a whispered voice he did not recognize, he said, “What, guapa? What did he do?”

“We had a basement, do you remember?”

“Marilena said no one went down there. It was too damp.”

“That’s where he took me, most nights. He tied me up, but it wasn’t what you think.”