Quotes from Jeanine Cummins

He's never been close to a tragedy that barbaric, never experienced a shock so primitive that it shakes him to the very core of his beliefs. In short, Nicolás has never had a fundamental change of heart.

Hope cannot survive the poison of her recent proof: the world is a terrible place. San Pedro Sula was terrible, Mexico is terrible, el norte will be terrible. Even her gold-dappled memories of the cloud forest are beginning to rot and decay.

migrants are like blown-open grenades, telling their anguish compulsively to everyone they meet, dispensing their pain like shrapnel so they might one day wake to find their burdens have grown lighter.

She's been afraid for so long that now she can't catch up to the facts: it was already him, and the rest of her family. It really did happen; all those years of worry did not prevent it.

There's a tug-of-war in his heart already, between wanting to remember and needing to forget. In the months to come, Luca will sometimes wish he hadn't squandered these early days of his grief. He'll wish he'd let it pierce and demolish him more. Because, as the forgetting part takes anchor and stays, it will feel like a treachery. He'll mistakenly believe it's his own cowardice erasing Papi's details—

The caffeine hits her bloodstream like a dream of another life.

They kept nothing of import from each other, but Lydia liked having a sacred cupboard within herself, to which only she was allowed access.

Everything we've been through?" Soledad says. "It'll all be worth it. We'll leave it behind and have a new beginning." Rebeca looks at the floor but her eyes are unfocused. "Like it never happened," she says. They

So we're leaving today, Papi. We are already gone. And you must be very careful and look after yourself, please. We are taking you with us in our hearts, and we will call you when we get to el norte, Papi. And we'll send for you when we have jobs, and you can come to us, and you can bring Mami and Abuela, too, and we will all be together again as it is meant to be.

She learns that there are flags people use here, and those flags may be a warning or a welcome.

She can't even imagine how this loss will shape the person Luca becomes. They need to do a funeral ceremony as soon as they're safe. Luca will need a ritual, a method of fashioning his grief into a thing he can exert some small control over.

The noise thunders into her bones.

On the trains, a uniform seldom represents what it purports to represent.

for every wickedness, there is an equal and opposite possibility of redemption.

where she imagines she's inconspicuous. This is the one benefit of being a migrant, of having effected this disguise so completely: they are nearly invisible. No one looks at them, and in fact, people take pains not to look at them.

empty carafes of wine on their table. "We should get one of those," Sebastián said. And though it was not yet noon, Lydia agreed, and they mostly drank their lunch that day instead of eating it. She cut her eyes at him across the table and did not say the things she wanted to say, that it was asinine of him to write this stuff, that he was turning himself into a target, that she wanted no part of his righteous campaign of truth, that she hoped he was satisfied with

and it seemed to me that we was like seafarers, and the tober was the ocean. We was passing the landlubbers by. We gawped at each other, us from our ships, and them from their shores, but the gap between us was so big we couldn't cross it. It was high tide or low tide, or whatever tide would prevent us from dropping anchor and rowing out to them, to exchange gifts and brides, gods and diseases

She wonders if he feels anything now, or if he's shut it all down, if Marta's death was too much for him, so he found a loophole, a way to opt out of humanity. She is stronger than he is; she feels every molecule of her loss and she endures it. She is not diluted, but amplified. Her love for Luca is bigger, louder. Lydia is vivid with life.

At worst, we perceive them as an invading mob of resource-draining criminals, and, at best, a sort of helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass, clamoring for help at our doorstep. We seldom think of them as our fellow human beings. People with the agency to make their own decisions, people who can contribute to their own bright futures, and to ours, as so many generations of oft-reviled immigrants have done before them.

If there's one good thing about terror, Lydia now understands, it's that it's more immediate than grief.

She's donated money. She's wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they come from, that this is the better option. That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn't even want them.

If you're a person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge?

She doesn't ask if he's okay, because from now on that question will carry a weight of painful absurdity.

He knows stability is the key, and he wants peace.