She shrugs. “I don’t know. A bunch of these letters are addressed to someone he calls mi corazón, but…”

“But Alejandro…” I shake my head. “That doesn’t sound like him. He was…”

I bite my tongue so I don’t say something insensitive again. But then Kiki huffs a soft, humorless laugh.

“You can say it.” She shuffles a few of the papers around, looking for a key perhaps to unlock the secrets Alejandro took with him. “He was a cad.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” I mutter.

Alejandro had a girl for every day of the week. He never treated them poorly, as far as I could tell. Never led them astray with false promises of love and constancy. But he’d always seemed to be the type to delight in variety. Not the type to pen romantic missives full of such great and terrible longing.

Kiki picks another letter out of the pile. “‘Please, be careful,’” she reads. “‘Stick close to Esmeralda’s. Wolves prowl the streets. Wolves always do, but these are worse. Protect yourself. If anything were to happen to you, I would never survive it.’”

We share a look.

“Esmeralda’s?” My voice lilts up at the end of the name, but it’s not a question. We both know exactly what that one name implies. “Does that mean…?”

“My brother was in love with a whore?”

The word sounds so vulgar falling from Kiki’s lips. She’s staring at the letter, her brow pinched in disbelief. But then, her eyes dart to me, remembering perhaps that I grew up there. For better or worse. Even if I myself had not turned to their trade. I could have. My fate had balanced on that razor’s edge before I tumbled to the side with Kiki and Alejandro and this massive home, grander than anything I ever could have imagined.

“I didn’t mean…”

For a brief delirious moment, I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s taken a misstep in this conversation. “It’s all right.”

Kiki sets the note down on the table, fingertips tracing over the blank space where Ale would have signed his name had he ever finished writing it. “I knew he’d been to such places. Most of his circle frequents them regularly.”

“Half of his friends are probably Rosalita’s clients.”

She glances at me. “You don’t think…?”

“No, of course no—” But then, I do think. I think about that night on the rooftop, when Rosalita held my breaking heart in her hands and did her best to help me mend it. The way her face lit from within when she told me about her new love. How she couldn’t share any details about him. Not his name, not even what he looked like. How she said he was different from all the rest.