Every time my brother-in-law drove me home, I would black out and wake up sore. My husband just laughed and said I was out of shape. After the fourth trip, I hid a voice recorder in my purse — and that night I heard a phone call that made me realize the blackouts had never been accidents.

And Aurelio turns up with a bottle of water in the cup holder. Opened.

“Here, Paloma. You look finished.”

And I drink it.

Every single time. For two years.

Because he is my husband’s brother. Because I have known that man for eleven years and he carried a box up four flights of stairs for us in 2016.

And because why on earth would you not drink a bottle of water your family hands you.

And then there is nothing.

Not sleep. Not a doze. Not the thing that happens when you are tired in a warm car.

A gap. With a clean edge on both sides of it, like a file somebody has cut a section out of.

And I wake up hours later heavy and sore, with my clothes slightly wrong.

When I told Esteban, he laughed.

Not cruelly. Not dismissively.

That man has never once been cruel to me in eleven years, not in an argument, not in front of his mother, not at four in the morning.