“What do I do about the boss?”

“Nothing. You can’t report him. The police won’t believe you. They could ask for your papers and arrest you because you don’t have any. They’ll send you back to your country and split up the kids because Nando was born here and Karina wasn’t. Go back to work and get your money. Start wearing a wedding ring. Don’t be alone with him. And if he tries again, remember it will soon be over.”

If she’d spoken to anyone but Toya that day, she might have gone about things differently. But Elena trusted her to watch her children, and so she trusted her counsel too. She decided never to speak again of what happened in the restaurant even if she relived it in her mind without end. Not to Mauro, to Perla, to anyone. Instead, she lit a candle every night to the devotional card of the Virgen de Chiquinquirá her mother gave her before leaving for the United States. She begged not to become pregnant and cried when her period finally came.

It was Talia’s first Christmas and Elena’s first without Mauro since they’d met. The restaurant gave bonuses for the holidays. Elena was able to buy toys for Nando and Karina. She sent the rest to Perla to buy something for the baby and set some apart for Mauro for when he turned up at the house.

Her calls with Perla got shorter. She couldn’t bear to lie to her mother, tell her everything was all right when it wasn’t. Normally Perla would put the baby on the phone before hanging up, but Elena was afraid of passing her pain to the child, as if contagious even by sound. She felt a liar, a conspirator to the man who abused her because she protected him with silence. Now she understood why he chose her.

Elena and the children celebrated Nochebuena with the other residents of the Sandy Hill house who’d all pitched in to buy a Christmas tree, decorated with homemade ornaments and paper garlands, and between them prepared a feast. They’d just finished eating when Elena’s phone rang. She heard Mauro’s faint voice, his first call in months.

“It sounds like a great party.”

Elena ached to confess that despite the guitar strums and villancicos he heard sung in the background, she was drowning without him, but she knew in his own way he was drowning too. She put the children on the phone so they could hear their father and imagined the things he might be saying to them, watching their expressions of glee and confusion. Papi, they said over and over. Es Papi.

Elena remembered a story Perla told her in the months before she and Mauro left Colombia. They were sweeping the lavandería as they did every evening after locking up. Elena worried about leaving her mother alone. The workers they hired were undependable, rarely lasting more than a few weeks. Perla told her about a mother and daughter who lived alone together like they had before Elena met Mauro. The mother and daughter were very close, loved each other very much, and had no family but each other. One day they were walking together on the road when they were confronted by a wicked man who macheted them both to death. The daughter had lived a pure life, so she went straight to heaven. But the mother had lived a longer, more complicated life, so she waited in limbo, looking up to heaven, and one day spotted her daughter in all her eternal glory. She called for her daughter to lower her hair so she could climb it and join her in the upper world. The daughter dropped her braids, her mother climbed, and the two were overjoyed at being reunited. The mother thought her daughter had saved her from languishing in the void, Perla had said. She didn’t know she’d already been purified, that her daughter was only waiting until it was the mother’s turn to be called home.