A long moment passed before Esteban spoke again, switching into Spanish. “I was hard on you,” he admitted. “I thought I knew better, and I didn’t—I didn’t know how else to prepare you for life. It was how your grandfather raised me.” Esteban rarely spoke about his own father. He’d died well before Gabe had been born, when Esteban had been a teenager in Mexico. Gabe looked at his father’s body, at the minor scars, the signs of age. Life had been hard on this man. As a father, as the head of the household, as a small business owner, as an immigrant. Gabe had only one of those responsibilities,
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