It’s not that Dolores didn’t want to see the President gone. But she had thought Daniel brash to run off to the mountains and feared every day that squads would come in the night, would shoot the whole family, dump their bodies in a hidden grave, burn their house, rape her girls. She feared Daniel joining the rebellion not because she disagreed with it in principle but because she had stopped believing any kind of change was possible. She wanted to live. And, even more important, wanted Carmen and Elena to live.

But life right now. Daniel brought home less some weeks than others, and they always lived on the precipice of hunger, of falling ill with no money for a doctor or a hospital. Daniel had to hand over half his already scanty earnings to some guy with Yanqui connections. And she knew the stories about the firing squads and the disappearances and the young girls who’d been whisked from their beds in the night because they caught the President’s eye.

As stories of the military’s defeats circled more and more, Dolores began to see. She began to see, in whatever lay on the other side of the regime, something akin to her own do-over. If the rebels in the mountains succeeded, if her husband left and died a hero, if she woke up a new woman in a new country. She might dare to seek a future, any future, that wasn’t this.

As it happened, Daniel did leave to the mountains after a skirmish with Batista’s men depleted the ranks of guerrilleros and Fidel once more put out a call over Radio Rebelde. But before he did, Dolores came closer to death than she ever had before, even with her ribs broken, with her mouth pouring blood and her tooth in her hand, even closer than that.

Two months after Daniel killed a man for the first time, he looked for something, who knows what. He’d ducked under the bed and seen the curious slash in the mattress. And when he found the wad of money, when he dug his hand into the exposed spring coils and came out with a fistful of cash, he grabbed a sobbing Carmen and Elena by their hair, threw them into the bedroom they shared. Then he took Dolores by the neck as she washed dishes at the sink. He took her by the neck with one hand and with the other ripped off her dress and left her in her slip. He dragged her through the door.