“Talia had the baby,” he says.

“Congratulations.”

“We named him Peter, after your dad.”

“Great. I’ll get him a picture book with trucks.”

I want him to remember his own love of big yellow trucks. I want him to ask himself how he grew from that boy to a man who rapes on command. But Ray smiles, delighted, and I hate myself for giving him that moment.

The elevator doors slide open. They have the same squeak they did the last time they let me out. The hallway still smells like detergent failing to cover over a hundred years of human history.

Grandma’s at the apartment door, standing straight with her hands folded in front of her black skirt. She wears the bland, beatific expression of a woman with neither the desire nor the ability to scold or punish.

“Timothy’s gonna be driving you from now on,” Ray says. “So, I’ll see you around.”

“Yeah.” I remember my grandmother is there and curtsey.

Ray gets back into the elevator.

“I’m glad to see you alive and well.” She gives me a nod.

“You too.” I kiss her cheek.

“Come in, come in,” she says impatiently, stepping aside to give me room. “Before an outsider swoops you up.”

The old threats seem so foolish now. Why was I ever afraid?

Once I’m in, she closes and locks the door.

“I’ll put on a pot of water.” She shuffles to the kitchen.

The apartment is the same, but different. Where Daddy’s formal portrait hung, there’s now a clean white rectangle. There seems to be more air in here without his steely gaze.

The rest of Daddy’s things don’t look any different for being the property of a dead man. His cane sits by the door with its brass handle and tip worn to a diagonal—the grooves that make the shape of a cobra’s head are shallow and shiny where his hand wore them away.

The same pictures of him look back from their frames. At the cusp of puberty, in his own father’s shadow, he’s tilted to one side on his club foot.

I take down a wedding photo I’ve seen so many times I’ve taken it for granted. By the time he married Mary Ballardo—my mother—he’d learned to compensate, standing straighter than any man around him. But when he moved, he was fearsome. Once, I was looking in his office between the edge of the door and frame while he held a meeting with three other men. He leaned just a little left when he took a step and turned that purposeful overcompensation into a chokehold on the man next to him. I ran away before the scene played out. I’d seen too much already. The sway of his gait became his way of maintaining a frightening unpredictability.

“He turned disability into power,” I say, looking for grief and finding only fear.

“What do you mean?” Grandma Marta seems truly baffled.

Daddy wasn’t disabled to her, and his authority was for the good of the Colonia. She’s too old to change the way she sees the world, and yet, she looks too young to understand how a man wields power.