The first thing you learn about abandonment is that it does not always arrive screaming.
Sometimes it comes quietly, like rain on a tin roof, like a note left on a wooden table, like the soft click of a door closing before sunrise while three infants sleep in their cribs and a tired man does not yet know his life is being split into a before and an after.
That was how it happened to Don Rafael.
By the time the storm rolled over the little Veracruz town and pressed gray light against the windows, Marisol was already gone. Her clothes were missing from the narrow wardrobe. Her perfume no longer lingered in the room. On the table sat a single note, written in hurried strokes that looked almost annoyed to have been bothered with explanation at all.
