Luz looked at her mother.
"The doorframe," Inez said slowly. "Oh my God. Papi. The doorframe."
The closet in the lavender room had been Inez's closet first. That was the part of the story Luz knew by heart, because it was the part of the story Abuelo told every October: how on Pilar's birthday, every year since Inez was three, he had stood his daughter against the closet doorframe with a book flat on her head and marked her height in pencil and the date, and Pilar would say the same thing every year, Ay, she's going to be taller than you, and every year Inez wasn't. How in 1999 Inez had turned seventeen and refused, mortified, and the marks had stopped. How in 2016, when Inez and Raúl split and Inez moved back in with a three-year-old on her hip and nothing else, Aurelio had stood his granddaughter against the same doorframe on the same date and started again. How he had never let anyone paint that trim. When they did the lavender walls he had taped it off himself, every inch, and Luz had been forbidden to so much as breathe on it with the roller.
Luz had walked past it ten thousand times. She had packed her whole room around it and not once thought: That doesn't come with us.
Neither had her mother. Inez stood in the lavender room doorway looking at the closet and put both her hands over her mouth exactly the way Kiara had on the landing.
There it was. A strip of plain pine trim, darkened by forty years of hands, running up the left side of the closet door. From knee height to just above Luz's shoulder, a ladder of pencil lines. The lower set in her grandmother's handwriting at first, then her grandfather's tall capitals: INEZ 3. INEZ 4. INEZ 5. All the way up to INEZ 16 — 1998. And then, starting low again, so low you had to crouch to see it, in the same capitals but shakier: LUZ 3 — 2016. And on up. LUZ 7. LUZ 10. Kiara's name was there too, twice, small, off to one side, K.G. 9 and K.G. 11, because she had been at the house on Pilar's birthday two years running and Aurelio had said, Everybody under this roof gets measured. The last mark said LUZ 12 — 2025, and it was a little crooked, and Luz remembered why: he had needed her to hold the book while he marked, because his hand had started to shake.
Behind them, slow, Mr. Bek came up the stairs carrying Aurelio's elbow. He looked at the doorframe for a long time without saying anything.
"That's not in the contract," he said finally.
Inez turned to him, and Luz saw panic come into her mother's face, real panic, the first she had seen all day. "I know. I know, I'll — we can — I'll pay for new trim, I'll — "
"No, no. You misunderstand." Mr. Bek held up one broad hand. "I mean, it's not in the contract, so it's not mine. I didn't buy it. It was never for sale." He looked at Aurelio. "I have a pry bar in the car. A flat one, very thin. If we go slow from the bottom the nails come out clean and the wood doesn't split. But it's your trim, sir. You should tell me how."
Aurelio drew himself up in the doorway of his granddaughter's room. He was still wearing plaid slippers and he did not know, Luz was fairly sure, what year it was. But he looked at the doorframe, and he looked at the man from Colorado, and when he spoke it was in the voice he had used on apprentices for forty-one years.
"From the bottom," he said. "And you put a shim behind the bar so you don't mark the wall. The wall is his now. You don't mark another man's wall."