Elena was not selfish enough to think her pain unique. The Sandy Hill house had several women tenants on their own—husbands and novios in other countries or held by the system. The neighborhood was full of mixed-status families. Sometimes they heard about Immigration raids in the area—sidewalk roundups or weekend sweeps at playgrounds and backyard parties—and people would try to avoid leaving their homes for weeks. With the apparent logic that removing fathers is the most efficient method for undoing a family, the officers targeted men more often than women.

Elena sat around the kitchen table with two other Colombianas, Carla and Norma, as the children played on the living room floor, with baby Talia lying on a play mat beside them. For weeks after Mauro left, Elena managed to work a handful of days helping other women who cleaned or at a bakery on Market Street. It wasn’t hard to find someone to watch Karina or Nando, but even Toya, the Dominicana who ran a small day care out of her apartment, required that children left with her be out of diapers. Carla and Norma, with three children each, said there was only one way to manage. Send the baby to be cared for by her grandmother.

“She’s American,” Carla said. “You can bring her back later when you’re more established. If you keep her with you now, you’ll never get on your feet.”

Going home was never an option for these women. When Elena brought up the possibility of packing up, taking the children to Colombia to be with their father and grandmother, Norma warned, “This is a chance you won’t get again. Every woman who has ever gone back for the sake of keeping her family together regrets it. You are already here. So are your children. It’s better to invest in this new life, because if you return to the old one, in the future your children may never forgive you.”

What was it about this country that kept everyone hostage to its fantasy? The previous month, on its own soil, an American man went to his job at a plant and gunned down fourteen coworkers, and last spring alone there were four different school shootings. A nation at war with itself, yet people still spoke of it as some kind of paradise.

On certain autumnal days in the north, Elena could close her eyes and see the crystal sky over Bogotá, a blue that only existed at that altitude, the afternoon mountain cloud cascade when twilight swept the city in gold. She still struggled with the inertia of the North American lowlands, the feeling that she was always sinking.

She would have been happy living all her life in her country. There was an alegría inherent to Colombians, optimism even through tears, but never the kind of self-interrogation of “happiness” she observed in the north, the way people constantly asked themselves if they were content as if it were their main occupation in life. And what was happiness? Not selfish fulfillment, of this she was certain. That seemed like a recipe for the opposite. Joy was in the loving and caring of others. Carla and Norma understood this too. For them, happiness was a bet on the jackpot of a better future, a dream life that would justify every sacrifice. For them, there was no going back to the life before.