Nick had apparently texted my mother on that new, fancy phone he had just gotten her. He had asked us to come over, said he was going to take us out to a movie. It was the first time he had ever offered such a thing, and my mother was so excited. Her lover was acknowledging her. He had chosen her over his wife. At least that’s what she had told me this meant. She looked into my eyes and explained that love conquered all. She told me that our lives were about to change. No more run-down apartments with bars on the windows, no more Top Ramen dinners, no more worries about gang-ridden schools.

“Nick is going to take care of us, mija,” she said. “He’s going to love us.”

It was confusing to hear. On the one hand I had desperately wanted my mother to be a real-life Cinderella . . . but then, Cinderella’s prince hadn’t been married to somebody else.

We got in my mother’s run-down Toyota, and by eight thirty we were parked in front of Nick’s house. My mother told me to wait in the car.

It felt . . . wrong. Even at ten I understood that my mother had committed a sin, and sins couldn’t be rewarded by riches. That wasn’t how fairy tales worked.

So I sulked in the car as my mother went to the front door of Nick’s five-million-dollar Brooklyn Heights home. I plugged in to my portable CD player and turned up the volume to an eardrum-shattering level as my mother rang the doorbell and then, after a moment, tried the door, which gave way for her.

Watching my mother walk into that house, all I could think about was that she didn’t deserve her good fortune. She didn’t deserve to ride off into the sunset with this man . . . and yet . . . wouldn’t it be nice to live in that house, right here on this pretty street with all these gracefully arching trees? In my bedroom at home I could always hear people outside yelling, drunk, threatening. On the street where I lived with my mother there was always something to fear.

But here? On this street in the nicest part of Brooklyn? Everything felt safe.

That’s what I was thinking as I sat alone in the car, admiring the way the leaves glistened under the streetlights, listening to Madonna sing about the equalizing power of music.

I didn’t see my mother come running out of the house. I didn’t see her until she was flinging herself back into the driver’s seat, a cell phone pressed to her ear. The car was dark—our interior lights broken long ago—but when I pulled off my headphones I could hear the panic in my mother’s voice. And I saw that there was some kind of stain on her shirt and something dark and wet on her hands.