Page 23 of The Lion in the Library

She smiled at that — small and real. “You keep saying that. Anytime. Like it’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing,” I said. “But it’s also not complicated. I want to be here. Anytime you need someone to be here.”

The kitchen was quiet except for the distant sound of the city outside the window. Estrella looked at me for a moment with the expression I was learning to recognize — the one where she was letting herself believe something she wasn’t entirely sure she trusted yet.

Then she said goodnight, and I walked to the car, and I sat in it for a moment before starting the engine.

On the passenger seat was my notebook — the one I’d been carrying for six months, the one titled Football is Life at the top of page one in increasingly mocking letters. I picked up my pen and opened it to a new page, well past the abandoned memoir, and I wrote three words.

I looked at them for a while. Then I put the notebook back on the seat, started the car, and drove home.

The three words stayed in my head the whole way.

Not Football is Life.

Something else. Something I wasn’t ready to name yet, but that had been waiting, I was beginning to suspect, for longer than I knew.

THE FIRST STRIKE

ESTRELLA

Iwas making lunches. Pedro was in his pajamas demanding that I find his red car, which I had just discovered under the couch cushion but was choosing to deploy strategically. Luz was in the bathroom performing what she called her “morning beauty treatment,” which appeared to involve every hair clip we owned and a level of commitment that would have impressed my old makeup team in Mexico City.

Roberto called at seven-fifteen on a Wednesday morning, which was in itself an act of aggression. Roberto Salinas did not wake before nine if he could help it. That he had managed it today meant he had been thinking about this call for long enough to be irritated by it.

“Estrella, mi vida.” The old endearment, deployed with the ease of long practice. As if three years of near-silence were nothing.

“Roberto. I’m getting the children ready for school,” I said. “Is something wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I’m in Los Angeles. Did I tell you? I’m shooting a series here — very exciting project, American network, prime time. I thought we should see each other.”

“You and I?” I handed Pedro the red car without ceremony. He examined it, declared it satisfactory, and disappeared.

“Me and Luz, of course.” A pause that I recognized as calculated. “And you. Informally. As co-parents.”

Co-parents. We had not co-parented. We had, at best, parallel-parented from different countries, with Roberto’s contribution consisting of occasional telephone calls and one birthday gift that arrived two months late and was clearly chosen by his assistant. The card had not even been signed in his handwriting.

“What do you want, Roberto?”

“I told you. I want to see my daughter.” Another pause. “I also want to understand what I’m seeing in the papers.”

And there it was.

“You’re seeing a photograph of me at a public event,” I said, my voice very steady. “At a library.”

“Dancing with Leo Ramirez.”

“Yes.”

“Is it serious?”

Luz emerged from the bathroom at this precise moment. She had arranged approximately six hair clips at points across her head that bore no obvious relationship to each other, or to any known convention of hairstyling. She looked extraordinary. She looked like a small, extremely confident person who had invented her own aesthetic and was entirely at peace with it.

“Luz,” I said, “your lunch is on the counter. Your backpack is by the door.”

“Mami.” She stopped in the middle of the kitchen and turned to face me with great seriousness. “Do I look like a princess?”

“You look like a queen,” I told her.