Near the end of Maria-Elena’s life, her stories mixed reality with illusion. She had once begun each tale with its date, solemnly announced, the only legacy of a poor family. But, in her old age, the dates changed—across days, then years, and later centuries—so that memory and prophecy contended in the same story. It was as if the decades piled one on another in the old woman’s mind until history, the weakest of the arts, could no longer bear all she remembered. Something more supple, like magic, took its place and let her loose to follow the flights of the ghosts who crowded her dreams.

As he looked at the lockup, Rivas felt the weight of memory as it must have burdened Maria-Elena in the end. Week by week, the space around him filled with more history: interrogations, arraignments, sentencings. A body facedown on a bedroom floor. Kids watching from a doorway. Third generation of a family cuffed in the back seat. Women together on a bench outside the courtroom. New nicknames, tattoos, and cheap guns to remember. Each name and date added to others before them, links in a chain that bound Rivas to the criminal justice system no less than it trapped the men inside the jail.

Rivas sat up and wiped perspiration from his forehead. He had come to meet with the drug dealer Arturo Peña and his lawyer. Climbing out of the car, Rivas walked stiffly across the lot to the jail entrance. Inside, he turned over his handgun and went through the security gate. A guard escorted him to the visitor area. The place had a smell Rivas never got used to—the mustiness of steel and concrete and the stink of men crowded together.

The accommodation for visitors to the lockup consisted of six dark booths in a narrow hallway. Each had two chairs, a countertop, and a window with a speaker-box facing the common room of the general population. In the third visitors’ booth, Rivas found Peña’s public defender, Maricela Hernandez. Rivas had known the lawyer for five years—from when she passed the bar and began taking cases.

Hernandez wore a tan suit and balanced a briefcase on her lap. When she saw Rivas, she smiled. “Buenos días, Daniel. How’s Teresa?”

Rivas shrugged. “High blood pressure. But I guess everyone with teenagers has high blood pressure.”

Hernandez squeezed his hand. “Better to have girls, Daniel. Boys are trouble.”

Rivas sat in the second chair and smiled back. “Too late now.” He looked into the commons room. “What’re we here for?”

Thirty feet away, Peña hunched over a table in the common room, his chest and upper arms stretching the fabric of his jail clothes.

“I don’t know.” Hernandez motioned for Peña to come to the window. “Arturo asked to speak with you.”