The children in the light’s halo were eight or nine, two boys and one girl. The girl’s hair was sopping wet and she held a small black backpack with a broken strap. The kids looked at one another and slowly walked toward the agents, the girl dropping her backpack as if unsure what to do with it.

Ana became acutely aware of her breath, like she had no idea how she’d ever breathed without thinking about it, without measuring each inhale and exhale. Her whole body a spark. She wanted to run but had the better sense to stay hidden. She watched the agents’ flashlights zoom above her as they made circles. She huddled deeper into the shadow of the bushes before her and thought of the promise she’d made her mother before she died—she’d survive, she’d fight. She told herself to swallow. She told herself to breathe.

They rounded up the rest of the children. Ana knew the parents instructed their kids to purposely look for the agents, to go to them. All sorts of rumors—they wouldn’t send children back, they’d process asylum more quickly for a child without a parent or a parent with a child, they’d send them straight to their families if they had someone in the country. None of it was true or all of it was true.

So much silence and the mind became unbearable. She’d cried quietly many nights on the floor of drop houses and motels all over Tamaulipas, San Luis Potosí, Monterrey. Cancer had ripped through her mother so fast, there was little time to consider something so frivolous as loss. What a luxurious thing, to feel. The pain a tender ache now that she could massage and curl into. For so long, she’d held the grief at bay. She’d smiled strong for her mother as she walked her brittle body down the corridor of a clinic or placed the ventilator over her mouth. She’d pretended that, when her mother coughed and the tissue came away wet and blood spattered, there was still possibility, a chance for recovery. Her very job, Ana thought, had been not to grieve, so that her mother could. She’d been the airy balance in a world of plastic tubes, breathing machines, metal. On her silent trip, Ana had allowed the weeping child through, a child as alone in the world without her mother as she had been six years ago.