Mauro closed his eyes for a few seconds to try to trick himself, then opened them. For one suspended moment, he succeeded. There was his own family seated at the table: Mauro and Elena, each distracted by the details of the day, a life where ominous news headlines only infiltrated their nonviolent world as mealtime conversation. The children. His son, angular and slouched, an expression still hopeful, unmarked by the rejection Mauro had known as a boy, and not a hint of the desertion Mauro had imposed on his own kids. His first daughter. A face like her mother’s, serene but withholding. Talia was there, too, the one he worried had been so protected she’d become too fearless. He blinked again and they disappeared.

With the lavandería closed and no more prospective tenants for the shop below, the upkeep of Perla’s house became too expensive for Mauro to afford, even with Elena’s contributions from abroad. Mauro suggested renting out rooms, but Elena didn’t want her childhood home converted into a hostel or boardinghouse. The surrounding blocks were filling with cafés, galleries, bars, and trendy shops, though theirs was still untouched. Compared to the newer buildings coming up in the area, Perla’s house only looked more decayed. Every potential tenant remarked the same thing. The structure would need a complete remodel. It might be worth more torn down.

“Just sell it,” Elena said. She’d sign whatever papers were needed to give him the authority to do so on her behalf.

He wondered if time bleached her memories of the house so they were mere scratches on a pale canvas. No longer an inheritance but a gorge of debt, a place she didn’t expect ever to return to much less to live. But Mauro feared losing the house would make the family even more rootless; without it and with her mother already gone, once Talia joined Elena in the United States, there would be nothing left for her in Colombia.

Before turning the keys over to the new owners, Spaniards who planned to convert the building into a language school, Mauro and Talia went to the roof, the first place he’d kissed her mother, and sat on the ledge facing the crown of Monserrate. Lightning scissored in the distance. Talia said the city was so ugly and the weather so bad, she didn’t understand why the capital hadn’t been founded in a better climate. Mauro reminded her it was the land of their ancestors and their connection to it ran deeper than Bogotá being designated the nation’s principal city. In the time before colonization and extermination, before their language was outlawed and they were given a new god and new names, they were a potent and powerful civilization of millions.

He wanted to convey to his daughter the price of leaving, though he had difficulty finding the words. What he wanted to say was that something is always lost; even when we are the ones migrating, we end up being occupied. But Talia wasn’t listening, already tiring of her father’s stories. He felt her detaching from him, from their city. She saw their new apartment as a temporary place, counting down until she could leave it. What she didn’t know, Mauro thought, was that after the enchantment of life in a new country dwindles, a particular pain awaits. Emigration was a peeling away of the skin. An undoing. You wake each morning and forget where you are, who you are, and when the world outside shows you your reflection, it’s ugly and distorted; you’ve become a scorned, unwanted creature.