He nods. “Thank you, Fabiola, you’re too kind.” He sips more of the sweet taste that has created a world of illustrations in his brain, shards of forgotten truths. And with the walls heaving and the floor taking on a wet sheen almost like heated tar, he thinks of those boys. Their faces. So young. Seeing his daughter in court. He tells Fabiola, “You know, I paid big money to keep my daughter out of the papers. Keep what she did away from the news. I went out and found her a place that would hospitalize her and care for the sickness she had. But as I said, she was adopted. She wasn’t my blood. And you can’t control the outcome of something you never created. People who aren’t your own have different ways about them, unknown to you. That’s what my mother tried to warn me about before the adoption went through. See, how this happened was, Sarah had lost our second child. And she couldn’t do it again. She could not go through all that. But those kids, Megan had babysat them. They trusted her. And who wouldn’t? She was such a beautiful girl. She could have had a wonderful life. But something wasn’t right up there. And a person never knows the why when they decide to do what she did. You just never know what that child’s bloodline was. My mother was right. Megan could have had mass murderers or rapists or psychos in her real family’s tree. Like everything in life, it was a gamble. Turns out, it wasn’t right.”

“What wasn’t right?”

Talking aloud. Outside the boundaries of himself. Tingling in his fingertips. He feels the vastness of galaxies inside him. His words loud and deep, the bass tones rattling his bones loud enough to hear.

“The big problem was not being around enough—always at the office or traveling on business.”

“Who wasn’t around?”

“I. Me. I wasn’t really around. I mean, I was there when I wasn’t traveling. And in the courtroom, I was there for everything, but I was always busy. Buried myself in my work. Reading reports, facts, and figures. Had documents to review. But my wife, she dealt with that. She dealt with Megan. I paid the court costs. But I was working, always working. It’s all I knew to do.”

Sipping her wine, Fabiola tells Jack, “Mi marido—my husband—he wasn’t around much. Always he work at the mine. Long hours. Early to bed on Sunday night to get to work on Monday morning. Unless there was overtime. He took it. Always. Sleep in his truck between shifts. Not come home. Always told me, it’s not safe, but it’s a good living. Before leaving, he would say, ‘remember the insurance and the pensión that goes to you if I do not return.’”