I didn’t let myself watch their entire exchange. I went to our living room, where my brother was sketching faces, and watched him until our mother and sister returned to the cottage.

I want to say that our family entered a new era, not just of reunification, but of truth-telling that began with our mother, who told me a few days before our sister’s arrival what happened to her years before when she worked at a restaurant, at the hands of the man who hired and paid her. Maybe I sensed something like this had happened to her because I didn’t react with tears. I only listened, and when she was through, her face slack as a sheet hanging in the rain, I held her and told her I was sorry for being too small to protect her, but she said it was the very reason she was telling me now, to protect me from something similar happening, and most of all, to defend me from silence. In time, she would tell my brother and sister, she said, and our father too.

That night I thought about how love comes paired with failures, apologies for deficiencies. The only remedy is compassion. I thought about this again when my sister told me of her crime and how she’d run away from her school on the mountain in order to catch her flight to this country, because she thought if we knew or if she asked to postpone the flight we’d change our minds about wanting her to live with us; how she hitched rides across the departments of Santander, Boyacá, and Cundinamarca, and slept beside strangers until she made her way back to our father, and before she left that final morning for the airport, she wrote a letter to Horacio, the man she burned, saying she was very sorry she hurt him and wished him a good life though she did not expect to be forgiven, and she asked our father to mail it for her, though the mail in Colombia was notoriously unreliable and there was no way to know if the envelope, which she’d addressed to the restaurant where he once worked, made it to his hands.

By this time, we knew our father was on his way to us. He made it to Laredo, a border city we’d heard about on the news due to all the deportations of people who arrived seeking asylum from danger in their homelands, the separated families, parents and children torn from one another and placed in detention. But he was safe, only hours from where he began his first journey in this country with our mother and me. He called to say he’d made it to a migrant shelter run by some nuns where they let him rest. Someone there connected him with a volunteer group that told him buses and trains were too risky. Through their network they arranged a series of car rides and safe houses so he could cross the country. Till then, we waited. Our mother didn’t sleep much those nights, and sometimes I left the room I shared with my sister to sit with her on her bed and listen as she told me it was a scary thing to have all your prayers answered.