After taking a shower I joined them downstairs to find that Mr. Rochester had already prepared an early dinner for his niece. Mac and cheese from a blue Kraft box, along with a Pop-Tart for dessert. He informed me that he’d help her get ready for bed. I was to wait and meet him in his study at nine p.m. Now she’s asleep. Now, for all intents and purposes, we’re alone.

Hanging from that branch with the bark digging into my palms felt better than this.

“You were older than Paige is now.”

“Older when my father died. Younger when my mother died.”

“A sad story.” I’ve received plenty of sympathy over the years. Fake sympathy, mostly. The kind Paige got from the school principal. I’m sorry, but you need to get over it. This is different. Mr. Rochester does not offer sympathy. He remarks, as if on the weather.

“Are you going to fire me?”

He considers me, unmoved by my question. It’s not that he’s saying yes or saying no. He does not feel compelled to answer me. “And after that. You had no family to take you in?”

“My mother’s parents are still alive. They refused.”

“Why?”

“For the same reason they disowned her when she married my dad, probably.”

“Which was?”

“His race. His lack of money. Whatever the reason, they didn’t explain it to me.” My father was from Mexico. An undocumented immigrant, technically, though he was naturalized when he was young. My own citizenship has never been in question since I was born here, but I’ve faced plenty of dirty looks, discrimination, and muttered comments to go back where I came from over the years.

With my dark hair, dark eyes, and olive skin, I look like my father.

The irony is I’ve never traveled out of the United States. I don’t speak any Spanish. I know as much about Mexican culture as my mother, who was white. My father was too busy working long hours at a call center to teach me about it. He was more concerned that I ace English literature than learn Spanish. On the rare nights he got home before eight p.m. we’d order pizza delivery and watch Battle Bots together.

When he died I lost more than a father. More than a family.

I lost my only link to that half of my heritage.

He picks up a file on the side table. It sat there all this time, being an innocuous manila folder. Now he pulls it onto his lap and opens it, it becomes something else. A grainy picture of me as a child sits on top, a serious expression because I never smiled even when my father was alive. A serious child, everyone said. Other people would insist that I should smile, but Daddy would stop them. “No, she’ll smile when she wants to. Not before.”