Her mother bought an alarm to scare off thieves. The daughter had asked, then, if there wasn’t one for rapists, too. The mother knelt down, looked into the daughter’s eyes, and promised that she would never go through anything like what her classmate had. Because she and Daphne were different, her mother said. She had a father and Daphne didn’t. And Don Osvaldo knew it, because he knew her father. Which was true, her father used to borrow tools he needed for repairs on the house from Don Osvaldo. She was safe, because she had a father. And she had to be grateful. That’s how her mother ended that speech: “Be grateful.” But there must have been something confusing in her mother’s tone of voice, in her eyes or her gestures. Because when she said that, it sounded like a reproach, like she was saying exactly the opposite. Until that moment, her father had only to state that the water in the bathroom was the coldest in the house for her to know that he was special, the wisest man on earth. But in the precise moment when her mother revealed to her how fortunate she was, she realized that her father wasn’t enough. And also that she was in debt. Indebted to her mother for having given her a father, for staying with him to form a family; it was a debt that would be with her for a long time, one that was impossible to pay off. It would be whispering into her ear every day, forcing her to shoulder her mother’s delayed dreams, all her sacrifices and failures.

So she was grateful, but when her father left them she almost felt relieved. She didn’t feel all that sad or overwhelmed. Because her mother didn’t appear to be, either. Surprised, yes, or that’s how it seemed, because of all those mornings she found her awake in bed, her eyes fixed for hours on the wall, as if it were a chalkboard where someone had left a math problem, or a riddle. She thought that what surprised her mother wasn’t so much that he didn’t love her enough to stay, but that he had the balls to leave. She had always underestimated him.