“The day before he left,” Carlos said.
My breath caught. That fit with what Penelope said—something had happened to make Andres take the kids back to their mother’s and buy a plane ticket to Laredo. Andres must have arrived in Laredo late Thursday, July 31, and either booked the hotel right away or after trying and failing to find Lore. Then he’d shown up at the bank Friday morning, thwarted from seeing Lore first by the board meeting and then by her doctor’s appointment.
The doctor’s appointment. Lore’s “annual,” her charmingly discreet code for a Pap smear. Carlos’s words chimed through me: I think she’s some kind of bruja. She makes people believe her. I thought of the plain little dinners we’d shared over FaceTime, laughing over our ham and cheese sandwiches. I felt a sick ache of betrayal, a pale echo of what everyone in her life must have felt at the time.
“Did you tell anyone about the pregnancy?” I asked. “Penelope? The police?”
But I knew, even as I asked. Carlos must have blamed himself—if only he’d never shown Andres the pregnancy test, his father might still be alive. So he’d done the only thing he could, all this time: try to forget. Until now. Until me.
“No,” he said. Quiet and simple. “Mira, now you know. I gotta—I’ve got to go. Take care.”
“Wait! Carlos!” I remembered my conversation with Penelope, months ago. “Hey—Penelope said to tell you her offer still stands.”
He exhaled, a threadbare sheet on a line. “Yeah. You just tell her not everyone wants to get old.”
Those words rang through me, desperately sad, as I sat at the kitchen table to write notes. So many lives irreparably damaged because of Lore, the implacable eye of the storm.
If she was pregnant and hadn’t told Andres, that meant either she’d known—or decided—the father was Fabian, or she was still determining what to do about the pregnancy. Terminating would be the only way she could continue her double life. But the timeline was likely too tight for the doctor’s appointment that day to be for an abortion.
Unless she’d decided to keep the baby. Maybe she’d weighed her options and decided to stay in Laredo, raise the baby with her original family, rather than lose Fabian, the twins, and her job to move to Mexico City. Maybe she’d already ended the relationship with Andres, or was planning to, and then Carlos found the pregnancy test. Even if Andres had never been aggressive before, I couldn’t imagine more perfect circumstances for violence than the discovery of not only your wife’s double life—but her secret pregnancy.
Then again, the same could be said for Fabian.
Duke was asleep, or pretending to be, when I returned to bed around three in the morning. His breathing remained deep and regular—a bit too regular, maybe—as I tossed and turned. “Duke?” I whispered at one point. Nothing. I thought I’d never fall asleep, but when I opened my eyes, it was morning and he was gone. Went grocery shopping, he’d texted me. Let me know if you need anything. Duke always harnessed his anger into executing complicated recipes. Not that Walmart was exactly Whole Foods. Okay, thanks, I responded. The read receipt appeared, then nothing. I swallowed, feeling as though I’d traded one form of guilt for another: Now that I was doing right by Andrew, I was letting cracks start to splinter my relationship with Duke. We would talk later, I promised myself. I would tell him everything. We would start fresh. It was time.
First, I had to call Lore.
The phone rang until it went to voicemail. After two more attempts, I reconsidered my approach. Maybe it was better to keep Carlos’s revelation close for now. Until I figured out what it meant—and what to do with it.
In the kitchen, my father was wearing an apron with a small brown handprint decorated to look like a turkey, beneath which Andrew’s name was written in careful, kindergarten-teacher print. The real turkey, bald and slick as a newborn, rested on the counter, and my father was squinting at his iPhone, as if reading instructions. His bruises were grotesquely shiny, as though coated with a layer of Vaseline. Must be nice not needing to hide them.
“Did you sleep okay?” he asked when I walked in. “Thought I heard you rustling around out here.”
“I had a work call.” Then, without knowing why, I blurted, “I’m writing a book.”
“A book!” My father set down his phone, smiling. “You always did love to read. What’s it about?”
Whatever had briefly opened in me closed. For fuck’s sake. I wasn’t trying to make my dad proud. “Never mind. Is there coffee?”
I was looking for the old coffeepot, the one he was always tipping into his thermos, with or without whiskey. I didn’t see it anywhere. He gestured to a black Keurig beside the toaster.
“Coffee pods are in the drawer. Tell me about the book,” he prompted again.
I slapped the Keurig’s chrome lid shut. “My agent doesn’t want me to talk about it,” I lied.
“Oh. Right.” He gave a self-deprecating chuckle. “I don’t even know what an agent is.”
Deborah. She’d told me to update her with any new developments—the phone call with Carlos fit the bill. Yet . . . the vibration in her voice when I’d shared my initial suspicions with her, the way she’d told me to keep records of my research, that we might be able to “use those artifacts later.” I knew what she meant. Photos in the book, bonus content on the website. Clues inviting the reader to play detective with me. That wasn’t the book I’d imagined, the book I’d promised.
Was it the book that would sell?
I willed the coffee to brew faster. God, my father looked ridiculous in that apron. Cheeks freshly shaven, the long lines of his dimples seared into his skin. Once, I’d stood beside him as he shaved, asked if I could do it, too. He’d squeezed a dollop of thick, pine-scented cream into my hands and showed me how to spread it evenly over my cheeks “like you’re frosting a cake.” Then he’d given me a disposable razor with the cap on, and I’d stripped the shaving cream off one stroke at a time. “You’re a natural,” he’d said, winking. “But it’ll be another few years before your beard comes in.” We’d both laughed.
“Cassie. When we last talked on the phone, I . . .” He looked pained. I was surprised he even remembered the conversation: Who do you think you are? “I’m sorry—”
“It’s fine.” I took my cup and hurried from the kitchen, stunned by my own cowardice. Breathless with anger—at him, at myself—I nearly barreled into Andrew in the hallway. He was clutching his crumpled pajamas under one arm, steam pouring from the open bathroom door.
“Whoa, sorry,” I said, forcing a smile.
Andrew gave me a serious, searching look, and in a disorienting flash I saw my mother looking at me the same way, examining my body for injury after I’d lost control on my Rollerblades or fallen off my bike. He had so much of her, and he didn’t even realize.
“You okay?” he asked. In one hand, his phone was open to a string of text messages. I suddenly wondered about his friends, what they knew, who he was going to miss.
I exhaled, ruffling his wet hair. “Yeah. Hey, I was thinking you could show me some of those karate moves.”
“Really?” The lilac pockets beneath his eyes were faintly puffy, but he grinned, locking his phone screen. “Now?”
“Oh.” I thought again about Deborah, the power she held over my career. I didn’t want her to forget about me while I decided what to do with new information.
Andrew shrugged. “Whatever. We can do it later.”
“No, no.” Andrew was right here in front of me. I had to start getting used to putting him first. “Now’s good.”