“—never meant for things to get so out of hand. Amy just—”

“There’s no point in beating yourself up.”

“—needed some time, and we’ve been talking about how to—”

“Jorge,” I say firmly. “Now’s not the time for this. We have to find Sophie.”

A weird sound comes out of Jorge’s throat. It’s as though he’s choking—or as though he’s having a fight with himself, trying to make up his mind between saying what he’s feeling and accepting that what I’m saying is true.

“I—I can think of somewhere to start,” Erika says, and Jorge and I turn to look at her at the same time. “Mateo, that day you brought her to the bodega a few weeks ago—she asked me questions about Mexico. She wanted to know how far it was and how to get there.”

I swallow hard, thinking back on that day. I remember hoping that Erika would find the right things to say to Sophie, that she’d be able to comfort her, but I never asked her what happened after I stopped listening in.

“What did you say to her?”

“I told her it’s far. I said you would need to fly there, and then she wanted to know where ‘Nework’ was, so I asked if she meant Newark. I said it was in New Jersey, on the other side of the river, but that’s about it.”

“She’s been there before,” Pa says in a whisper. “Last year, when we picked up Jorge from the airport—he flew into Newark.”

Was that really last year? It feels like forever ago, but it’s true—Jorge was returning from Puerto Rico, and he asked Pa if he could come meet him at the airport because he had brought back heavy suitcases. It was Ma’s idea that we should all go and wait for him in the arrivals section, just to surprise him, and so we took the train from Penn Station to get to the airport.

“You don’t think she would try to go there, do you?” I ask Pa. He’s silent for a long time, and I wonder if he’s thinking the same thing as I am—that if Sophie was desperate enough, she may have run away. After all the times we told her she couldn’t go to Mexico, she might’ve wanted to take matters into her own hands to try to go be with Ma.

“If she did, she wouldn’t have gotten very far,” Jorge says.

“That doesn’t mean she wouldn’t try.”

Jorge stares at me with fear in his eyes, and my legs start shaking as I think of all the things that could happen—all the things that could go wrong for Sophie if she actually is trying to get on a train to the airport.