They rejected the pregnant widow, but the grandmother who took her in had a secret.

Chapter 8

Year three brought expansion.

We hired a woman from town named Rosa to help with the herb business. She was a widow like me, older, with grown children who’d moved away. She knew plants and had a good head for numbers.

With her help, we started supplying herbs to two pharmacies in the city. Nothing huge, but steady income. Reliable.

We also started hosting workshops — teaching women from the area about medicinal plants, about natural remedies, about the old knowledge that was being lost as young people moved to cities.

Nana Concha led most of the teaching. At eighty-something years old, she was still sharp, still strong, still passionate about passing on what she knew.

Little Ernesto, now three, would sit in on the workshops sometimes, playing quietly in the corner, absorbing the information in that unconscious way children do.

He was starting to help in the garden — or what he thought was helping. Mostly he just dug holes and moved dirt around. But Nana Concha praised every effort, told him he was learning to talk to the plants.

He believed her completely.

The Montiels stayed away.

I would see them occasionally in town — Don Rosendo at the feed store, Bulmaro at the cantina. They never approached, never spoke.

It was as if an unspoken agreement had been reached: we would occupy different worlds, intersecting only in the neutral territory of the market and the church.

I was fine with that.

I had no interest in reconciliation with people who’d shown me who they were in my darkest moment.

But I wondered sometimes about little Ernesto — whether he would grow up curious about his father’s family, whether he would want to know them.

I decided I would let him choose, when he was old enough.

I would tell him the truth about what happened, and I would let him decide for himself what family meant.