‘You’re strong. Not everyone can do that.’

‘Grandmother says I take after her. When I left my husband, I left behind everything about him – his name, the ring, our apartment. I started again from new.’

‘Why did you leave him?’

‘He cheated on me, drank too much beer, smoked too much weed. Could never keep a job.’ She shrugged again.

‘Did he ever hit you?’

‘Only once. And I hit him back harder. That was the day I left. And I never looked back.’

‘I’m sure he regrets it now.’

‘I know he does. He called me up every day for two months trying to get me back. Too bad,’ she said with defiance. ‘You can never go back, right? Our momentum must always be forwards.’

Charlotte’s smile stuck in place and she merely nodded. She looked away, inhaling deeply and trying to steady her own emotions but Nathan’s reappearance in her life underpinned everything, destabilizing her world.

‘So it’s just you and your grandmother? That’s why you’re so close?’

‘Yeah, growing up she always said we were like peas in a pod, the two Marinas. I’m her mini-me.’

‘Still, your grandmother must miss your father,’ she said simply. ‘To have him live so far away when she’s so old . . . Even if he’s flawed, he’s still her son.’

‘Maybe.’ Marina was silent for a long moment before she gave a quiet exhale, her shoulders dropping and rounding again, the gathering fight dissipating in her. ‘Yeah probably. For my sake, she pretends she doesn’t but I can tell she does.’

‘Did she have any other children, besides your father?’

‘No. She said she had always wanted lots of kids but my grandfather was killed in the war and that was that for her – she never remarried.’

‘The Second World War?’

‘Worse – the Civil War.’

‘Right.’ So there were no further heirs then, the blood line on Marina’s side hadn’t split into multiple tributaries. ‘Marina, do you have any idea why your grandmother left here all those years ago? Why she never mentioned that her family was alive?’

‘No. Like I said, we thought she was an only child.’

‘But now that you know the truth, has she still not said anything? To be a Mendoza, I mean, it’s not a name you can escape in this country . . .’

‘She won’t discuss it.’

‘And you’re okay with that?’ Charlotte pushed. ‘This is your family too. Your heritage. Don’t you think you have a right to know where you come from, to at least understand why the opportunities and advantages that were rightfully yours were taken away from you? Your life could have been very different. Perhaps should have been.’

Charlotte watched her, seeing the bitterness in the set of her mouth, and wondered how her grandmother had just looked on – watching her son cross the country in search of work, her granddaughter’s marriage collapse into violence, all of it under the strain of poverty, knowing that with one admission, they could step out of these circumstances at any moment and claim their birthright. It was one thing to have fled her family all those years ago – she must have had her reasons, whatever they might have been. But to continue to actively choose this life, in the face of the deprivations and hardships of subsistence living . . . Could what she had left in wealth really be worse than what her own family now endured in poverty?