I’ve been sober almost a year—fuck whoever says Suboxone doesn’t count—but still find myself making calculations like How much Oxy could I buy if I sold an antique book, a rare collectible? But then I remember that even if I’m not getting high, I still need money. Money my mother won’t give me anymore. Money my temp jobs hardly pay me. My mother would pay for a trip to Cuba but wouldn’t see me to the airport. My mother would pay for a trip to Cuba but would check my eyes each time I said I needed help buying groceries.

“Maydelis, these are incredible. Where did they come from?” I ask her.

“They were in the wall.”

I stare at her.

“Abuela found them in the walls of the house—twenty years ago, I’m talking about—when she was expanding the house.”

I have heard this rumor, about valuable artifacts hiding behind the innocuous-looking plaster of homes all over Cuba, though I’ve heard only of jewels, gold, old bills now worthless; I’ve never heard of old books hidden in the walls. I have also, perhaps, assumed the story was just another exaggeration, another drama-seeped tale from my mother.

My mother’s story was that in the 1950s and ’60s, when wealthy Cuban families plotted escape from the revolution, they sometimes hid their valuables in the walls of their homes. Back then, these wealthy families expected the revolution to fail—a year or two sunbathing in Miami, a year or two playing dominoes and staring at the ocean. Some later immigrants were allowed to leave the country with only two changes of clothing and three pairs of underwear. That was my mother.

Any money or jewelry left behind, which the families were forbidden to take out of the country, would become property of the state. But these families, expecting to return to the island soon enough to reclaim their property and resume their wealthy lives, buried treasure in their sprawling yards, hid jewels in the foundation of their mansions, stacked cash beneath the floorboards. There were stories of some of these once-opulent homes in those once-elite neighborhoods of La Habana crumbling to ruins around the families now living in them, families whose bad luck turned once they saw sparkling rubies and sapphires beckoning in the rubble.

“Maydelis, this is incredible,” I say once more.

“I know,” she says, but she doesn’t seem to think it’s incredible at all.

I steal the book in the middle of the night. My grandmother and Maydelis are asleep. Crickets chirp and flies buzz in and out of the wooden-slat windows. So easy. I tiptoe through the hallway, grab Les Misérables off the shelf, take it to my room, and tuck it into a corner of my gusano beneath some shirts.