What is there to say? To this cousin of mine whom I’d never met in person before? She is beautiful—fat black curls and deep-set, almond eyes. She has a strange, lopsided smile. I try to detect signs of what my aunt said when she sent the email announcing Jeanette’s trip—of the drug addiction that held her captive for years, of the drama of a failed relationship that tends to age a person. I can detect no signposts of hardship, only a brightness of the eyes, a conspiring touch on the arm that says, We never knew each other but blood is blood and we can be honest now.

So I’m as honest as I can be with someone whose life feels so far from my own. I tell her what happened last night after she left me on the long elevated patio of the Hotel Nacional and went to bed. We’d ordered mojito after mojito (even though technically Jeanette wasn’t supposed to drink), and tipsy, I’d glanced at the Malecón below, at the couples making out under salty mist, the peanut vendors with their paper cones and singsong advertising. And I’d considered the events of the night: the unattractive German man who’d chatted us up, who’d asked so nonchalantly if we’d like to join him on a trip to Varadero. Jeanette had said no. I’d said yes. Courage up from the rum warming my throat I’d pulled her into furtive whispers in the bathroom of the hotel, not unlike our huddle under the sugarcane. And I’d told her the truth: that he’d asked me up to his room and that I intended to go. If she was shocked, she didn’t show it in her face. If she’d wondered about my husband, she didn’t ask. Perhaps those are the signposts. My cousin knew life was complicated and none of us were fully who we pretended to be.

“But, Maydelis, what will you tell Ronny?” Jeanette slaps a mosquito on her arm and leaves a streak of blood.

“That we drank too much. That I decided to stay in your room. And I’ll tell him the truth about this—that we decided to leave to Varadero so you could see the beach.”

“But he won’t worry that he hasn’t heard from you since yesterday?”

“Sometimes I don’t come home, Jeanette. Sometimes he doesn’t either.”

There. The truth. It’s out and engulfing us with the sticky country air. Jeanette doesn’t press me further. But I know what she wants to know, so I add: “The sex was okay.”