Silence. Then: “It’s about Gabriel.”
The pinhole of Lore’s vision widens, then narrows again. A different kind of dread rises within her. “Gabriel? Tell me.”
Mateo sucks the inside of his cheek, the way he used to as a toddler. “He wouldn’t want me to say anything. But you’re going to find out anyway. Don’t freak out. Okay?”
“Mateo,” Lore says sharply.
“He was caught cheating in Chem,” Mateo tells her in a rush, evading her gaze.
“Cheating.” The first wisps of relief are settling. Okay. She can deal with that. “God, Mateo, you scared me!”
Mateo’s cheeks flush. “Oh, I’m sorry that’s not bad enough to get your attention.”
Lore nearly rear-ends the car in front of her, she’s so surprised by his tone. She parks across the street from the pediatrician’s office. Next door, a young boy and girl play basketball in a dirt front yard, the net long since torn from the hoop.
“That’s not what I meant,” Lore says. “Okay. Cheating. Off who, exactly?”
Mateo doesn’t answer.
“You,” Lore says. Mateo, who aces all his science classes.
“It’s just that if he fails, he’ll get kicked off the basketball team!”
Lore digs a thumb between her eyebrows, where lately the frown lines have been etched each morning. “So you’re not worried about the failing, per se. Or the cheating, or the fact that you’re both in trouble. You’re worried about his basketball status?”
“You don’t understand. He—” Mateo cuts off with a rough cough, wincing. “He can’t get kicked off. He needs it.”
“Needs it? For what?”
“Well, who do you want him hanging out with?” Mateo stabs the button for his seat belt. “The team or those other chucos?”
“Chucos?” Lore says. “What chucos? You two have had the same friends forever!”
Mateo snorts, and his derision shocks her. What has she been missing?
“What chucos, Mateo?”
“Rudy and Wayo. You know what? Forget it.” Mateo yanks the door handle. “You obviously don’t give a crap.”
“Mateo!” Clearly, it isn’t only this he feels she doesn’t care about. Has she been fooling herself all this time, thinking being with Andres has made her a better wife and mother here, when all she’s really been is gone? “Of course I do. Mateo, look at me.”
He does, hair falling into his eyes. He has one leg in the car and one leg out.
“I care about you two more than you will ever know.” Lore thinks of the boy, Luis Ramón, buried alive while his mother could do nothing except stand on the street, hoping her voice might bring him comfort. She wonders if the woman tried to lift away the rubble herself, convinced her love would give her superhuman strength. She wonders if the woman felt the moment her boy stopped breathing. “Do you understand me?”
A one-shouldered shrug.
“We need to sit down, all three of us, and figure out what’s going on,” Lore says. “But you did the right thing.”
Mateo grimaces. “Don’t tell him I told you.”
“I won’t.” Lore grips his arm. “Mateo.”
“Yeah?” The sun hits his eyes, making them glint amber.
She says again, “More than you’ll ever know.”
Cassie, 2017
Everyone who becomes obsessed with a particular crime wants to discover something new about it. Some clarifying detail that will shift the whole thing, the way an image can look like a vase until the exact moment it becomes the profile of a woman’s face. I’d wanted to investigate the crime—if you could call it that, which was, confusingly, less obvious to me than when I’d begun this project—of Lore’s heart. But after talking to Oscar Martinez and Sergio Mu?oz, I felt my focus being pulled in another, more familiar direction. One I told myself I’d been trying to resist, yet whose magnetism I’d felt since first holding the case file in my hands. I wanted to know everything about Andres’s murder—and Lore’s role in it.
“How about this?” I said to Lore in October. At six thirty, it was getting dark outside. The duplex next door glowed with orange lights, the trees decorated with stylish sugar skulls. I pulled my slubby cardigan around me on the front porch bench, adjusted myself so my face wasn’t hidden in shadow on the phone camera. “Each call, I’ll ask you one question about that day. One question, and we’re done.”
Lore sat in her usual spot on the living room couch. As always, she held the phone too low, so it caught the soft underside of her chin. “If this is my story, my book, shouldn’t I get to say what goes in and what’s left out?”
“We can’t just leave out what happened to Andres,” I said, trying not to lose patience. “It’s part of your story. Not all, but part. I need to know the details from your perspective. Lore—do you trust me?”
As I asked, I realized—I really wanted to know. After months of exchanging some of the most intimate stories of our lives, did she trust me? Should she trust me? What did we owe each other at this point?
“Fine.” Lore reached for something, a blanket, maybe, shifting on the couch. “But I get to ask you one question in return.”
I rolled my eyes. “Aren’t you already doing that?”
She laughed.
“Let’s start from the beginning,” I said. “I spoke to Penelope, and—”
Lore sucked in a breath. “You did? And you’re barely telling me?”
“It was recent.”
“Well, what did she say?” Lore brought the phone closer, her face pinched with strained eagerness.
“That’s one question for you,” I said, trying not to sound smug. “She said they never received your letters.”
“?Por eso!” Lore nodded once, indignant and also oddly satisfied. “No wonder she said those things in the article.”
“Well, that’s probably one small part.” Sometimes it still shocked me, the way Lore didn’t seem to see what she’d done as unforgivable in the eyes of those she’d hurt. How did she learn to judge herself so gently in a world that taught women to nail themselves to the cross for any tiny infraction? “She said she and Carlos were staying with Andres that week. They were supposed to be there that weekend, but Andres suddenly took them back to Rosana’s and went to see you. My question is—why?”
If Lore was surprised by the new information I’d discovered, she hid it well. Her expression barely changed, a serene still frame. That was the tell. I was onto something.
“Honestly?” She sighed. “I wish I knew.”
Bullshit. There was something too regretful in her voice, almost performative. Don’t forget, Penelope had said. Lore is a very good liar. But I had an advantage over the people in Lore’s life back then. I already knew this about her.
“You’re telling me you have no idea why he made the sudden trip to see you?”
Lore flicked on a lamp as the room dimmed with sunset. Shadows gathered in the hollows of her face. “By all means, ask the same question a million ways. You’ll get the same answer. My turn: When did you last talk to your father?”
She knew exactly how to knock me off balance. “I don’t know. My birthday last year, I guess. What did Andres’s note say?” I’d meant it when I said we’d be done after one question. Now Lore had made it into some sort of game, one for one, and I wasn’t going to be the first to stop.
“Ay, Cassie, no sé.” She huffed a breath. “Look in the police records.”
My pulse quickened. “I have. You told them the note said, ‘I’m sorry I missed you.’”
“?Entonces? You already know, so why are you asking me?”
“Because I don’t believe that’s what it said, or at least not all it said—and I don’t for a second believe you don’t remember.”
Lore said nothing as we stared at each other. A stalemate.
Lore, 2017