He beat her as he usually did, except this time he did it right outside their house, where Dolores stood crouching and shivering, horrified that a neighbor might pass at any minute and witness her shame, her C-section-scarred belly and quivering thighs. When he was done pummeling her at the door, when he’d drawn a bloody gash across her cheek and punched her eye shut, he grabbed her by the hair and threw her back into the house, to the bedroom. Then he pulled his machete from behind the bed and held it over her.

She was aware, from movies and such, that some people saw their lives flash before them at the moment of death. But that didn’t happen to her. She didn’t see a montage: Dolores as a giggling child in her own mother’s arms; Dolores wiggling up palm trees to knock down coconuts; Dolores afraid and exhilarated when a handsome man came looking for her; Dolores and a bloody, beautiful Carmen; Dolores nursing Elena as her mother lay dying. None of that happened.

Dolores didn’t see. She felt: a roaring beast in her gut, salivating, frothing for another chance to open her mouth and form a word, any word. The beast found ferocity in her she’d never again recover. She apologized, of course. Sobbed and begged and pleaded and summoned her daughters’ names in the hope of reaching the humanity in Daniel. But he swung. He swung and her hands sprang and she grabbed the handle with such strength, with such rage, that the machete halted inches from her face. Inexplicable. A Hollywood-worthy ending. She felt like Marilyn Monroe. A Cuban Marilyn Monroe in underwear with one eye swollen shut and smears of her own blood, who knew from where anymore, soaking her slip.

It was enough to stop Daniel: miracle. He crumbled to the floor, panting, then threw the machete across the room. “You fucking puta. You’re lucky I didn’t slit your throat.”

She was Marilyn Monroe, and she had never felt more certain she could survive without Daniel.

And then Daniel left for the mountains again.

But this time, she listened to Radio Rebelde every day he was gone. She listened for any sign of defeat, that bombs would rain over the tropics. That Daniel would walk into a campo town thinking he’d meet sympathizers but then—gunshot to the face. That a snake the size of a palm trunk would slither into his tent, crush his neck in the night. Her money gone. He’d taken the cash from the mattress. But she didn’t care. If she’d learned one thing from that beast in her, that beast that had absorbed death so she could live, it was this: She would survive. No matter what.