“Yes, Héctor,” she said. “I am just like you.”

His bottom lip quivered.

He thought of what Aishah and Jackson had told him at lunch. And here was his own abuela, admitting that she was just like him? It swallowed him whole. Aishah’s words came back to him: You’re not alone, you know that?

“Your parents wanted me to tell you for a long time,” she said, the tears streaming freely. “You were too young when Esteban and I separated. Oh, Héctor, he was so supportive of me. He said he’d always suspected, and he wanted nothing more than for me to be happy. So when you came out, your papi begged me to tell you. He thought it would help you.”

“Wait,” he said, wiping at his cheeks. “I’m confused. Who was she? Why have I never met her? I thought you lived alone.”

She pressed her lips together tightly. “You were five when it happened.”

He frowned. “I thought you said Abuelo Esteban left you when I was like two.”

“Her name was Rosa,” she said.

“Was?”

Oh no, he thought.

Abuela Sonia gulped down some of her hot chocolate. “A drunk driver hit her,” she said, then blew her nose on a napkin. “She didn’t suffer.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish I could have met her.”

“Me too, amor. Me, too.”

She put her head in her hands for a moment, and Héctor stood up and squeezed into the booth next to her, so he could wrap his arms around her torso as her body shook.

“That’s why I didn’t tell you,” she explained. “I wasn’t ashamed of who I was. I wasn’t ashamed of her. I wasn’t ashamed of my marriage ending. I just . . . I didn’t know how to tell you that the person I loved most in the world was no longer here. Every time I worked up the courage, the words seemed to evaporate.”

“You tried to tell me,” he said as it dawned on him. “Weeks ago.”

She nodded. “I recognized what you were going through,” she said. “But then I worried . . . what if I was making it about myself? What if I was wrong about what I thought was going on, and then you pulled away from me?”

“But Abuela, I would never leave you,” he said, and he hugged her tight again.

“I guess I just got worried about someone I love leaving me. Again.”

She told him how hard it was to deal with absence, to have a hole in your life that couldn’t be filled by anyone or anything else, at least not at first. But slowly, over time, the hole began to shrink.

It reminded Héctor of something he hadn’t told her. “You know my old friends from Alta Vista basically ghosted me?”

“Ay, no,” she said. “That has to have made this hard.”