Her family was neither rich nor poor. They lived in a neighborhood adjoining the gated community where my father owned a house. I believe they rented. I didn’t mention Latisha to my parents because I knew my father would disapprove of her. There had been hardscrabble Findleys in Texas and Louisiana since before those states joined the Union, and part of my father’s legacy was a racism so offensive he had long since learned to conceal it in polite company. Istanbul had been a particular strain for him, but he found plenty to complain about in Houston. When he was at home he dropped his veneer of tolerance like a pair of tight shoes. The world was being mongrelized, he said, and he knew exactly who was to blame. I didn’t know whether my mother shared these views. If so, she never spoke about them; like me, she had learned to ignore my father’s rants even as she pretended to listen to them.

His racism was almost antiquarian, poisonous but—so I thought—toothless. Nevertheless I wasn’t eager to introduce him to Latisha, who happened to be black. I had already met her family. Her father was a pharmacist; her mother had moved to Houston from the Dominican Republic twenty years ago and currently worked at Walmart. They had always treated me with a cautious but sincere cordiality.

I followed the old railbed until I was opposite the loading bays at my father’s warehouse. I found a dark space between two concrete abutments and hunkered down where I couldn’t be seen, not that there was much chance of anyone coming by. The warehouse was closed, and although my father occasionally stayed late to take care of unscheduled business, this wasn’t one of those nights: he had come home for dinner and settled into the sofa with a drink in his hand and a twenty-four-hour news channel to glower at. The rain fell continuously and I was drenched and shivering, although it had been a stiflingly hot day—the rain fell from some colder, higher place than these cloistered back alleys. I watched the warehouse attentively for half an hour. From my earlier scouting trips I had concluded that there would be no one here after midnight but the night watchman, a skinny drifter my father had hired from the bus depot downtown. By watching the windows I had even established his regular routine: an hourly fifteen-minute walk-through of the upper and lower floors, the rest of his time spent in a small room with a single frosted and wire-reinforced window. I guessed he had a video monitor in there, by the way the light flickered.