"In April. Your art teacher, Wren Ashby. I listened to the voicemail in the stockroom at work." Her mother's voice was absolutely steady, which was how Luz knew it was costing her everything. "She said you'd fallen asleep in her class three times that month, and that you'd told her you were up at night helping your grandfather. She said, Ms. Montoya, I just want to make sure Luz isn't carrying something too heavy for her. And she left her number."
"You never said."
"I never called her back." Inez looked down at her own hands. "I listened to it twice and then I deleted it. And I went home and you were doing homework and he was in the recliner watching the Lobos game and I thought, Thank God. She's handling it. Do you understand what I'm telling you? I knew. Not everything. Not the milk, not the — " She touched the notebook. "Not three in the morning in his robe. But I knew enough. I knew you were up at night with him and I let you be, because I was so tired, and because if you were handling it then I didn't have to, not yet, not this month. I let my thirteen-year-old daughter be the night shift."
Luz couldn't speak.
"So no," her mother said. "I'm not going to say it's your fault. Because it's not. You did — " Her voice finally cracked, a hairline crack. "You did better than I did. You kept a log. You put a bell on the door. I didn't do anything. I deleted a voicemail."
"Then why," Luz said. Her voice came out raw. "Then why won't you look at me?"
Inez looked at her. It seemed to take a great physical effort, like lifting something.
"Because every time I look at you," she said, "I see you in that doorway at three in the morning saying hey, you're early. And I get so angry I can't breathe. And I don't know who I'm angry at. I think it's me. I'm almost sure it's me. But it comes out of my face at you, and I can feel it, and I don't want you to see it. So I pack. I've packed this entire house so I wouldn't have to sit down across from you and have you see my face."
Luz looked at her mother's face. It was right there. It was not angry. It was something much worse than angry, and much easier to forgive, and she found that she could not forgive it, not yet, not today, and that this was its own kind of grief.
"You let me think it was me," Luz said. "For six weeks."
"Yes."
"You knew I thought it was me."