But then she opens the first album.
There is Gabriel as a boy, missing front teeth.
Gabriel at Coney Island.
Gabriel holding baby Elena.
Gabriel beside your mother, Lucia, both of them young and laughing outside a diner in Queens.
Your mother looks happy.
Not tired.
Not guarded.
Happy.
You have seen so few pictures of her like that.
Elena wipes her face.
“She came to us,” she says. “Your mother came after Gabriel died. I was sixteen. I remember hearing them argue in the kitchen, but my father sent me to my room. I thought she hated us.”
She looks at Mercedes.
“We all believed him.”
Mercedes nods through tears.
You sit with two women who were robbed too.
Not as you were robbed.
But robbed.
That realization complicates your anger.
It does not erase it.
But it gives it more rooms.
