That Nancy had a hidden stack of cash beneath a floorboard.

Doña Nancy spoke terrible Spanish but she managed to survive in a city like Irapuato where few tourists had reason to visit and not many people spoke English. She’d arrived, after several years of floundering from job to job in the States, to teach English at one of the private middle schools. She’d met Roberto by chance, on a weekend visit to Guanajuato. Roberto was taking a New York client on a tour of the mummy museum and in between an exhibit of a mummified fetus and one that wore socks, Nancy struck a conversation, delighted to meet an English-speaking Mexican whom she could pepper with questions. They exchanged numbers and two years later had a house in one of the new luxury colonias popping up all over Irapuato and a dual citizenship that allowed her to live in Mexico indefinitely.

Ana knew all this because Nancy loved to chat her up at the dining table as her mother swept and mopped circles around them. Ana liked that Nancy spoke to her as if she were any of the other adults in her life and not a twelve-year-old girl. Nancy said she had stood up for Ana and her mother, had vocally argued to keep them in the home even though Roberto had not wanted a Salvadoreña maid. It was typical, this attitude, Nancy said to Ana when telling her about how she’d fought for their hiring, as if Ana weren’t acutely aware of the bias she herself faced.

“He means well,” Nancy said to her that day, “but how do you undo what is so ingrained? I mean, Roberto has so much privilege. Privilegio. Do you know what that word means?”

Nancy liked to sprinkle her speech with Spanish even though Ana spoke English. Ana nodded though she wasn’t sure.