“Tío Enrique will be expecting me by this time, and I’m afraid of him, like everyone else,” she said. Abruptly, she got up and pulled her shift over her head, patted her hair, smoothed the dress. “I am afraid for myself and for Rosaria.” Elvira had fought back her tears, and her voice had grown cold and distant. “Tomorrow, when she returns home, she is going to tell Tío that I ran away with you, which will be true. I don’t know how she will explain how she allowed it to happen. I am afraid that he will suspect she had a hand in it and will do something bad to her.” Elvira paused. “Unless she does something bad to him first. She knows some of the things he knows. Maybe she will poison him. I think she should. I hate him.”

Hearing this spoken with such venom, after the warmth of love, was a little shocking to Will.

“You hate him that much? Why?”

She shook her head.

“Por qué? Por qué?”

“This”—touching the amulet—“was given to me by Rosaria to protect against evil, but Tío Enrique’s evil is stronger than it.…” The icy composure that had fallen on her so swiftly now shattered, and she started to cry again, not as before but in a hoarse clutching of breath.

He stood and held her close, and despite her height, she felt very small.

“What is it? What is wrong, Elvira?”

She uttered a few disconnected words—Should have … A fourth thing … Lo siento, should have …

“What?” he pleaded. “What fourth thing? Should have what?”

She repeated that it was late and told him to go back to his friends, but he sensed that she had said this only for the form of it.

“Not until you tell me what’s the matter,” he said.

She broke from his arms, dried her eyes with the backs of her hands, and turned away.

“Do you think I found pleasure in what we just did?” Elvira asked, in a voice grown cold again. It appeared that her emotional climate was subject to sudden and dramatic changes.

“If you didn’t, then you will become rich as an actress.”

“Not an actress. Puta. I pretended, como una puta, because maybe that is what I am. The act of love is painful for me. Sometimes it disgusts me, but I pretended to find pleasure, because I know how to pretend. I pretended but not to deceive you, oh, no, my Will, mi corazón, not you, because I do love you. To deceive myself.”

Elvira spun around to face him, and what she said next was spoken in a Spanish so highly nuanced that its meaning escaped him entirely.

“You are used, as was young Rosaria?” he said, repeating the phrase as he’d heard it. “That makes no sense.”