“I was eight when my mother brought home the LEGO Air Tech Claw Rig,” I said. “A 954-piece toy semi-truck with a working pneumatic crane. You bought that for me as a Christmas gift. For over two weeks, me and my dad lay on the living room floor putting that model together in front of the fireplace. You gave me an incredible two weeks with my dad. Sometimes what a man says doesn’t truly represent who the man truly is.”

Mr. Ochoa lowered his head. “Thank you, Octavio.”

Elena spoke up. “Octavio, Mr. Ochoa wanted to see you because he needs to ask you something. Something you might want to take a bit of time to think about—”

“But not too much time,” Mr. Ochoa said with a wheeze. “I don’t think there’s a road back for me this time.”

“There’s always hope, Mr. Ochoa,” Danny said in Spanish.

“No,” Mr. Ochoa said curtly, “there isn’t.”

“Anything I can do, it’s done,” I said.

“August,” Jackie said, her voice raising my pulse a bit, “Papa wants you to consider buying the company.”

I sat in shock for a moment before I found my voice. “I don’t know the first thing about running a company. I barely know how to run my own house,” I said. “Plus, Jackie’s your daughter. Your blood. Why not her?”

“Because I don’t want it, August,” Jackie said brusquely. “I’ve worked hard to build my own life. A life outside of the frozen prairies and plains of the Midwest. Outside of my hero brother’s memory. And one that definitely does not include selling tortillas and cheesy whatevers.”

Then they told me what was really going on: They’d been approached by a real estate speculator who went only by “Mr. Sloane.” Sloane—described by Francine Evers as an instantly forgettable skinny white man with male-pattern baldness and wire-rim glasses—claimed to be working on behalf of Detroit’s resident billionaire, Vic Bronson, a man who’d made his fortune selling mortgages and collecting adjustable-rate mortgage balloon payments in an overleveraged housing market almost twenty years earlier. Since moving his empire’s headquarters from suburban Birmingham to the revitalized Guardian Building in the heart of Detroit, Bronson had purchased thirty buildings through his Sextant Properties Group.

Now, it seemed, his larger-than-life shadow was falling on the edges of Mexicantown.

“He wants to demolish this place,” Danny said. “Turn it into some sort of boutique ‘ethnic destination’ shopping mall: tapas restaurants, avant-garde shops, an art gallery, ten to twenty high-end flats above. ‘Casa Nuevo Sol.’”

“Vic Bronson and this Mr. Sloane know everything about acquisition and possession,” Francine Evers said, “but they don’t seem to know boo about appreciating another person’s history or cultural heritage. A gentrified Mexican theme park is what he’s talking about. Ride the giant sombrero down the waterfall. Makes about as much sense as cornrows on a white girl.”