“I have to go check on something,” she said, already walking out.

She could feel Jeanette watch her, could imagine her exasperated face. Carmen walked out of the kitchen, down the hallway, walked past her guests with their faces turned to her, walked out the door. She could hear the conversation die down to a trickle and then silence as the latch of the front door clicked shut. She imagined Mercy turning to Pepe—Where did she go? She imagined Jeanette struggling to serve a flan, imagined her staring at her stacks of serving utensils in confusion.

The pervert, the sick sick man, the poor excuse for a human being, he who should have met a fate worse than liver failure. Her heels clacked loud on the pavement. My beautiful daughter. My beautiful, beautiful, lost daughter. Her daughter needed her. No, she wouldn’t abandon her this time. She couldn’t. She would be a part of Jeanette’s life, sober or not, she would, she must.

The other house. Again nobody answered at the other house. Carmen knocked and knocked. She walked across the driveway past the garage and turned. A fence separated the house from the next one, like her own. A small stone path cut to a low gate at the backyard. There was a trash bin and a recycling one. There was a small window perched inches over her head. Carmen stood on tiptoe and peered in. She could scarcely make out a bathroom curtain. She had never understood windows in bathrooms. Why not just a vent of some sort if humidity was the problem? Windows, so many windows. Florida was obsessed with windows.

It was dark now. But the heat hadn’t let up. Carmen could feel the moisture bunching on her lower back, into the folds of her suit. She could imagine her carefully sculpted curls frizzing into clown hair. She felt like a clown, creeping around someone else’s house, pushing back the words that surfaced despite a refusal to accept them as her thoughts: It was minor abuse. He’d touched Jeanette twice only, over her clothes. Just her breasts, Jeanette had said. That minor and abuse could even fit in the same sentence seemed preposterous. There was no minor in abuse, there was no Thank God, it could have been worse. Sexual abuse was no car accident. Sexual abuse was no spectrum. Was it?