At seventy years old, the geography of one’s life is often written in the aches of the joints and the rhythmic tap of a cane against cobblestone. For Doña Rosa, the streets of San Miguel de las Flores had begun to feel longer and steeper than they ever had before. She walked with a deliberate, trembling grace, her small cloth bag clutched tightly in a hand mapped with the veins of seven decades of labor.

The hunger was a dull, persistent gnaw in her stomach, a hollow echo that had grown louder over the last few days as her pantry emptied to nothing but dust and shadows. Pride is a heavy garment to wear when your stomach is empty, but Rosa had worn it like a queen’s mantle for years. However, as the cold evening air began to bite through her thin shawl, she realized that pride would not sustain her through another night. She turned her steps toward the affluent side of town, toward the house with the wrought-iron gates where her son, Luis, had built a life of comfort and prestige.

Luis was the pride of her heart, the boy she had raised on laundry water and scorched tortillas, working until her fingers bled so he could sit in a classroom and escape the poverty that had claimed her own youth. Now, he was a man of standing, a successful businessman with a wife, Verónica, who valued social appearances above all else. As Rosa approached the heavy oak door of his residence, her heart hammered against her ribs.She no longer walked the streets of San Miguel with a heavy heart, for she knew that the rice in her pantry was a reminder that love, though sometimes concealed, always finds a way to the surface.