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A man who, as I’ve recently discovered, was not the person I’d thought he was.

My jaw clenches, and I swallow down the anger that threatens to rise in the back of my throat like bile. Anger is not a comfortable emotion for me. I’m a pretty positive person—my mom always teased that I should be in El Club de los Optimistas, an NGO in Mexico back in the nineties.

But I idolized Abuelo. He was my damn hero. I grew up hearing all the stories from my mom and my tías about how he would help those in the neighborhood, always quietly without fanfare—buying groceries for the single mom down the street, enrolling a pair of rebellious teens in a volunteer program, hosting a huge party on Nochebuena for all our neighbors that would last into the early hours of Christmas morning. To me, he was larger than life.

I was only five when he moved to New York City—another sacrifice, another sign of his greatness. Leaving his family to provide us all a better life. Working as a janitor to send money home. He could never afford to come back and visit, but he always called on our birthdays. I’ve held the few tangible memories I had of him close, clutching them tightly. I can still smell the scent of his pipe tobacco and hear his deep laugh and feel the scratch of his whiskers when he would wrap me in one of his warm hugs. He was a man who embodied everything good in this world. Or so I thought.

Neil looks up from my article and leans back in his ergonomic chair. I have to press my foot against the floor to keep my leg steady.

“So,” he says. “Your grandfather was El Rasca?”

I nod. If someone had mentioned El Rasca to me five months ago, I’d have no clue what they were talking about. I’d only just unpacked my bags on the 2nd of January when my older sister, Lupe, called me. Manuel, Lupe’s husband, accidentally served Abuelita ponche con pikete—spiked punch—on New Year’s Eve. Suddenly, she started talking about Abuelo, and dropped a truth bomb that detonated the holiday mood.

Abuelo had a secret second family in the US. A wife and a son.

“And you’re saying,” Neil says, steepling his fingers together and fixing me with a sharp gaze, “that he had a second family back in Mexico the whole time he was working as an activist here in the city?”

My jaw clenches again. Neil is making it sound like we were the secret second family, when it’s the other way around.

But! I’m not about to insult the man who holds my dreams in the palm of his hand. What’s the English expression? Don’t look a gift horse in the face?

“Yes,” I say. When I first got the call from Lupe, it felt like earthquake sirens going off, the foundation of my being beginning to crumble. Abuelo was a man of legend in my house. I was named after him. And he was a liar and a cheater.

So I did what any good journalist would do. I started digging. I dug, and I dug, and I found out there were more lies. Abuelo wasn’t even working as a damn janitor at all. He was an activist, a well-known figure in New York City, fighting for the rights of immigrants and the Latino community. They called him El Rascacielos—the Skyscraper. Probably because he was short. Latinos do nicknames like that.

Lupe is pissed at me for uncovering the truth about him. But I’m a journalist, and uncovering the truth is my literal job description. No matter how painful it might be personally.

“He took his second wife’s name to hide his true identity. He lied to my grandmother—to my family. And yet, he did good for the community here in New York. I think his story fits with the series you’re doing.”

My boss at The Brooklyn Daily News is friends with a fact-checker here who told him The New Yorker was planning a series of features on important figures in recent New York history, calling it The Voices of the City. They were also looking for “diverse viewpoints,” and broadened their submission rules exclusively for the series. Writing for The New Yorker has been a dream of mine since I decided to go into journalism, and this is my one shot.

Neil glances at his laptop. “You’ve done thorough research.”

I nod.

“You’ve got a great sense of humor,” he adds. “And your voice certainly fits with our publication. Your English is very good.”

My English is damn near perfect. Now let’s hope I don’t accidentally misgender him.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Yes, your résumé is very impressive,” Neil says. “Reforma, El País, El Universal … And now you work for The Brooklyn Daily News?”

I nod. “Antonio Lopez sponsored my visa.” Antonio has lived in New York for twenty years but he’s from Mexico City, like me. I met him through my cousin, Nacha, who is dating Antonio’s nephew. Even in cities as big as New York or CDMX, you can always find someone who knows someone you’re related to.

“Don’t you worry about tarnishing El Rasca—sorry, your grandfather’s legacy?”

I purse my lips. “I think the truth matters more than a legacy.”

It wouldn’t be professional to say I’m hoping to tarnish his legacy. That exposing Abuelo’s lies feels like the only way I can exact any justice for my family. Even though Abuelo has been dead for eleven years, the sense of betrayal I feel is acute, like a fresh cut from a razor blade. There’s a special kind of pain that comes with learning your childhood hero wasn’t who you thought he was.

I love my family more than anything else in this world. I thought we were good, all of us, to the core. So yeah, Abuelo’s “legacy” isn’t something I’m interested in protecting.

I’ve been working on this article in my spare time and on weekends, in between covering things like the new recycling rules in Park Slope, or something called the Polar Bear Plunge in Coney Island, which sounded intriguing but turned out to be a bunch of white people jumping into the ocean at subzero temperatures. I do not think I will ever understand that.

“I really like the intersection of the personal and the political. The activist and the man. El Rasca was a force in this city. This is exactly what we’re looking for. But what about the family, the …” He skims his fingers over the trackpad of his laptop. “The Cuevas family?”

My skin prickles at the name. “Fernanda Cuevas died of cancer five years ago. She and my abuelo had one son—Ricardo Cuevas. I’ve been trying to contact him.”