He nodded against me. ‘You are the nearest thing.’

It took me straight back to Ivy and how much I hadn’t wanted to let go of her little pudge hand in that incubator. I did the same thing sometimes with Mátilda when we were playing – I’d hold her hand, like some creep. Ugh. I was doing what he was doing – coveting something that wasn’t mine, merely because it bore the slightest resemblance to the thing I’d lost.

‘What happened to her?’ I asked, as we broke out of our hug.

He turned away from me and marched back to his chair where a new rerun of The GGs was starting. He turned up the volume.

I sat on the footstool.

‘Stop looking at me like that,’ he sniffed.

‘You said we’re not the same, you and me, but we are, Tenoch.’ I muted the TV. ‘You feel your daughter’s loss like I do. We can only forget them for so long. The men I buried, did they kill Marisol?’

He shook his head. ‘No. But they rolled with the ones who did.’ He said it more to the muted Golden Girls than to me. ‘They thought I was informant for the drug police. I was not. Their minds had been poisoned. They tried everything to get me to confess. But I did not do it. I was set up.’

‘By who? Paco?’

‘No. Paco may be an asshole, but he has proved himself to me time and time again in business.’

‘What did they do?’

‘They started with the animals, one by one. Chickens, goats, pigs. My dogs. Then Errol, my tortoise since I was five years old. They cut off his head. Then they started on my family. My wife, and then my daughter. I had to hear their screams. For two days. I wanted them to kill me, but instead they left me with the pain. Revenge became all. I went crazy.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I went to the desert and tried to die. But God or Santa Muerte made me live. I got water, found food and I got strong. And when you are strong, you can think clearly. Body strong, mind strong. I’ve been the same ever since. I decided I wanted to kill more than I wanted to die.’

‘I can understand that.’