It was Ma who ended up getting a job offer—she’s been helping out in the kitchen of a restaurant in Puebla, and even though it’s not a lot of money, it helped them move out of the tiny room they were living in and into an apartment that’s a bit closer to downtown. Pa is still searching, but now that Ma has proven that it’s possible, he seems to be more hopeful.

“How much longer until I can come to Mexico?” she asks.

“Soon, mija. Very soon.”

“Mateo,” Ma says when she sees me next to Sophie. “¿Han sabido algo?”

“Not yet,” I answer. She’s asking about our passports—Sophie’s and mine. We submitted our applications a couple of days after coming back to Uncle Jorge’s, but they still haven’t come in the mail.

“We’ll all be together soon,” Pa says firmly. “Just hang in there.”

We haven’t even bought our plane tickets yet. We don’t want to risk having a booked flight and not getting our passports in time, so Pa is waiting until we receive them to look into flight options for Sophie and me.

“I can’t wait to have you here, mijos,” Ma says. “The apartment is starting to look better. We even bought some decorations at the market the other day. I think you’ll like it.”

This is what I’m talking about when I say that real life feels like a blur. It’s at moments like these that I zone out, that I feel as though none of this is even happening. Hearing Ma and Pa talk about our lives in Mexico makes my world spin a little. It forces me to imagine a life that I never even thought was possible—a life that had never been part of our plans.

Our passports come a couple of days later. It’s Jorge who finds the package in the mailroom downstairs. He bursts into the apartment while Sophie, Amy, and I are watching a movie, holding up a big envelope as if it were a trophy.

“They’re here!” he says.

We all sit around the kitchen table and watch as Jorge opens the envelope. Sure enough, when he tips it over, two passports fall out onto the table. They’re shiny and dark blue, and they smell like newly printed paper.

“Does this mean we can go to Mexico now?” Sophie asks, staring down at her own photograph in one of the passports.

“It does, Sophie.”

That night, when Jorge and Amy head off into their bedroom and Sophie’s in the shower, Pa and I talk on FaceTime. We both go through all the travel websites we can think of, trying to find the cheapest plane tickets to Mexico.

“Any luck, Pa?”