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much of both at the same time. I couldn’t risk going back to the house in Miami first. Emilio or my father might already be there.
    The four-hour drive from Key West to Miami airport felt like ten minutes. I guess I was shaking and crying so hard that time melted down into a puddle. I stopped once to get gas (the last time anything was charged to Valentina Cruz’s Platinum Visa), and a second time to hock my diamond earrings and tennis bracelet. I only got two thousand for both, which still makes me cringe. I know for a fact they were worth five times that, at least, but I was desperate, a pawnshop’s dream customer.
    During the rest of that drive, still shaking and crying, gripping the steering wheel, I had the strangest, clearest thought: I wondered if my mother had been shaking and crying when she left too.
    Five minutes.
    Lola and Ana hate her. I should too, but she was never quite real enough to hate. They remember the holes she left, remember missing her. But she didn’t leave a hole in me—I was only a baby. I grew up with nannies who cuddled and scolded and bandaged, while subtly planting the ideas that have always protected me: What kind of woman does that? Who would abandon three daughters and a husband and all that money? She must have been sick, mentally unbalanced.
    But now that I’ve fled too, I wonder. When did she find out what art really was?
    My phone buzzes. It’s a text from Lucien.
    Â Â Â  Tomorrow at 2. I’ll bring clothes. Don’t wear makeup.
    I shiver. It’s purely reflexive, involuntary as gagging.
    Four minutes.
    The chocolate. I need it. But it’s under the cot, and I don’t want to get out of my synthetic-fiber cocoon until I have to. Only the junk bars are left: the hazelnut, which I’ll eat even though hazelnuts taste like sweaty socks, because they’re perfectly good calories and food is expensive; and the white chocolate, which I’ll trade for real food the next time I smell something palatable being prepared by a roommate. Or I’ll melt it down and use it as a moisturizer.
    Maybe Jacques will give me more tonight.
    Food costing so much—that goes on the embarrassing list of things I should have known. That and things getting dirty. Who knew that you have to clean constantly just to keep filth from swallowing you? Probably most people, which is why the list is embarrassing. But it’s not my fault that the various nannies and housekeepers and paid mother-replacements did everything, and that none of them thought teaching us to cook, clean, or do laundry was part of their jobs. I guess it wasn’t. And is it terrible that I never wanted to know?
    Three minutes.
    I’m getting what I deserve now, sharing a nasty little bathroom with five other people, living on generic-brand ramen noodles and pity chocolate. I learned to wash my clothes—my ratty secondhand clothes—at a Laundromat with no English instructions. I’m proud of that. It was humiliating, fumbling around with the knobs and the quarters and the detergent, but I figured it out with the help of a Korean woman who didn’t speak English or French or Spanish but knew what she was doing and felt sorry for me.
    Nobody felt sorry for Valentina Cruz. There was nothing to pity, except maybe ignorance. Up until three months ago, I was too busy spending dirty money on vintage couture to stop and wonder about the things that had always been. I grew up with Papi’s business associates coming and going at all hours—young guys like Emilio, driving Porsches and wearing Gucci, happy to joke and flirt with Lola when Papi wasn’t around, and older men with the same dangerous toys and fewer smiles. But the problem with growing up with a thing is that you never question it. It’s normal.
    Until nothing is normal.
    Two minutes.
    I should just leave now.
    But it’s too late. I’m already thinking about Emilio’s closet.
    From the