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I remembered pieces of this world.

Not these people or these houses, but mornings with Mamá before La Cruzona became the only world I knew.

Normal everyday life had simply kept going while I disappeared from it.

I rested my head against Lachlan’s shoulder, wondering what my life would look like once Ciro Delgado’s world was finally behind us and all the chains it had put on us were gone.

A little while later, the families we’d passed had me thinking about Mamá again. Lachlan had heard me talk about her, but he’d never seen her—or the family she’d spent my childhood telling me about.

I reached for the backpack. “I want to show you something.”

Lachlan shifted beside me as I fished out my mother’s locket.

The antique white gold was cool against my palm, its tiny floral pattern worn smooth in places from years of being handled. I pressed the latch, and the four panels fell open.

“This is my mother’s family,” I said, holding it up to him.

Lachlan leaned closer.

I touched the first photograph. “Her parents. My grandparents.”

The next showed Mamá beside her brother, both much younger and long before Ciro had taken her.

“She told me about them when I was little. Their names, what they were like, things they used to do when she was a girl.” I smiled faintly.

Another panel held Mamá with me as a baby.

The last showed me older, tucked against her side.

My throat tightened.

“She used to tell me that if anything ever happened to her, I should find them.”

Lachlan’s attention moved from the photographs to me.

“She believed they would go to the ends of the earth to find her,” I continued. “She said they loved her too much to simply stop. And if I ever reached them and told them who I was, they would love me too because I was hers.”

It had sounded so simple when I was thirteen.

“I don’t know how much of what I remember is exactly right anymore. Just pieces.” I ran my thumb over Mamá’s face. “But she wanted me to know I had family somewhere.”

Lachlan stayed quiet and listened.

“I think Rafael is the one who kept the locket safe for me.” I swallowed. “Ciro never would have cared.”

I closed the panels and held the chain out to Lachlan.

“Will you?”

“Of course.”

I turned my back to him and lifted my hair.

His fingers brushed the nape of my neck as he fastened the clasp, sending a little shiver down my back.

The locket settled beneath my blouse. I was leaving with Papá’s name and the only piece of Mamá and her family I had left.

A couple of hours later, Miguel slowed and turned onto a narrow service road lined with warehouses and low concrete buildings.