“There is something else,” Carmen said. Her mascara ran now, splotches down her cheeks. “It was me,” Carmen said, “who encouraged her to call the police on you. I think it is my fault you were deported.”

Ana lifted her head. Beyond the kitchen, she could see the empty living room through the pass-through. Just a couch and a sliding glass door. The cat pawing at the door.

“What? The police? She told them to take me?”

“It was so long ago,” Carmen said. “What did I know then of what was right? What did I know then of what the world is capable of?”

Ana didn’t know whether she spoke about the death of her daughter, or Ana’s story. The air-conditioning sputtered on. How quickly a story unravels, an image blurs.

“Do you live here now?” Ana said because she could think of nothing else to say.

For so long, she’d had a different story about her own trajectory. She marveled at the way memory became static history, this thing so easily manipulated and shaped by her own desires. She had wanted to believe that Jeanette was a soft landing before the shock of detention, of deportation, all those years before. She had wanted to believe Jeanette kind. What did she know of other people? Of what they do?

“I suppose you could say that,” Carmen said, dabbing at her eyes with a napkin. “She rented this house because she couldn’t live with me anymore. And now I can’t seem to leave it. I bought it. I can’t seem to go home to my own big, empty house. I have no one left.”

“I have no—” Ana started to say, but then stopped herself.

The arrangement was supposed to be temporary. Ana was only thirteen, after all. Carmen deemed it irresponsible to let her live alone in the house indefinitely. Carmen had lived there only part of the time. But now she took all her things back to Coral Gables and made no mention of moving back. Months bleeding into months. Carmen helped Ana enroll at the local high school, the high school Jeanette herself had attended. But Ana wasn’t looking for a savior and wasn’t looking to save anyone else; she’d learned in Mexico how easily a person in a certain position over her could build that kind of story for themselves. She lied about her age and found a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant. School, work, five hours of sleep each night. Day after day. She offered money to Carmen for rent, but Carmen didn’t take the cash.

Ana didn’t actually see her that often, though Carmen did check in on her from time to time. Ana didn’t know how to feel about her, this woman who never knew her life. Who’d endangered it. She chalked up Carmen’s absence to memory, Ana embodying something Carmen wanted to forget perhaps.