He glanced back at me, then at Paulo. He chewed on this several minutes, until we crested the top of the mountain where it appeared most of Nicaragua had shown up overnight for the funeral. We exited the truck and Paulo was handing the keys to Zaul when Zaul glanced at the truck. “Nice truck?”

Paulo nodded emphatically and wiped the sweat off his brow with a dirty white handkerchief.

Zaul prodded him. “You like?”

Paulo’s hands were raw from yesterday and one palm was oozing from rope burn. “Nicest truck in Nicaragua.” Another nod. “God drive that truck.”

Zaul accepted the keys from Paulo, hefted them, and then tugged on Paulo’s short sleeve as he turned to walk away. Paulo pivoted, Zaul took his hand and turned it over and laid the keys in his center of his palm. “Your truck.”

Paulo’s face told us he didn’t understand. Zaul wrapped Paulo’s fingers around the keys and slowly closed his hand.

“Yours now. You…you keep it.”

Paulo looked at me, then back at Zaul. An uncomfortable smile. “I no—”

Zaul waved him off. “I—” He motioned to me. “We…want you to have it. It’s yours now.” He sliced his hand through the air horizontal to the ground. “Forever.”

Paulo eyed the keys, the truck, Leena, then me. I nodded in agreement. “You should take it.”

Paulo let out a deep breath that seemed to accompany a masked hesitation and wiped his forehead—something he did both when it was sweaty and when he needed time to think. Folding the handkerchief, he placed it back in his pocket and then he put a hand on Zaul’s shoulder. Paulo stared at Zaul several seconds. I could tell his mind was turning, but his lips were silent. Several times he tried to talk, but could not. Finally, he nodded, pulled hard on his frayed hat, slid the keys in his pocket, and walked off toward a crowd of people. Isabella slid her hand in mine as the four of us watched him walk away. Leena put her arm around Zaul’s shoulder. “Don’t take it personally. He doesn’t know how to say thank you. No one’s ever done anything like that, and it’s more than he can comprehend.”

Zaul was smiling, his teeth showing. It was the first time I’d seen him truly happy in almost a decade. He watched Paulo’s broad shoulders widen as he walked away. “I like giving stuff away. It beats getting it. Plus, I’m pretty sure he’ll take better care of it than I would.”

*  *  *

Not even the old folks remembered seeing a funeral with as many people. The line of people strung out behind the coffin was more than a mile long. It took an hour to process from the viewing to the graveside, where Leena drove two more crosses into the mud of Valle Cruces. The church that served the plantation had set up a microphone and huge speakers, allowing her to speak to the crowd, which she did with a grace and composure I’d never witnessed.

At the conclusion of the service, Paulo and I lowered her parents into the hole and Leena—wanting those who had come so far to feel they had a role in her parents’ burial—invited everyone to scatter dirt on the coffin. People waited on into night for that moment of closure. If a mountain can heal, Leena knew that, and as she stood receiving that endless line of mourners, helping them cover her parents in the same mud that killed them, she helped speed that recovery. If the soul of those people had been broken when her mother and father died, the hugs Leena gave sewed it back together. The fissure, the gaping wound, had been mended, and it was Leena who stitched it closed.

Until that moment, I could not articulate why I was drawn to Leena. Of course, she was beautiful. Mesmerizing even. But, that didn’t scratch the surface. There was something else, and as I stood there feeling dark and dirty in the shadows watching one woman heal the soul of several thousand people, of a region, I realized that Leena shined a light everywhere she went. She was a walking headlight. A coming train. A rising sun. Unafraid, she walked into the darkness, and when she did, the darkness rolled back as a scroll.

*  *  *

It was dark when we finally made it to the picnic. The people pulled her away and Leena danced and laughed and ate and laughed some more. Isabella ran between her mom and me and Zaul and Paulo. She was covered in food, and at about ten o’clock I took her to the pool where parents were washing their kids and just washed her off. She loved it.

I watched Leena, spying from a distance. I was falling further and further from my resolve to tell her about my role in the collapse of this place. What did it matter? Her parents had been found, people were happy. There had been closure. She knew she was loved. Was it selfish of me to want to tell her? Get it off my chest and dump it on hers under the guise of being truthful when in reality I just wanted to make myself feel better? I couldn’t answer that. All I knew was that I was carrying a weight and I wasn’t sure where it would land when I unloaded it or what damage it would cause.

But I knew better. For the first time in my life, the truth was eating me. Like gasoline in a Styrofoam cup, it was eating me from the inside out. Even Zaul picked up on it. “You okay, Uncle Charlie?”

As I watched Leena, I remembered the first time I’d seen her. The memory flashed.

It was here. On this mountain, on the road just below us. When I’d rented a motorcycle and ridden up here as everyone was walking down after we’d foreclosed. A woman was walking down, pregnant and alone. The emptiness on her face caught me then and returned now. It was Leena. I had watched her walk right past me. An enormous unseen millstone driving her like a piling into the earth. The pain pierced me as I remembered the empty, lifeless look in her eyes as she glanced at me. Seconds later and seem­ingly unaffected, I’d cranked the motorcycle and left that mountain and its people in my dust. I boarded Marshall’s plane and stared smugly down at this world from thirty-five thousand feet while that new-jet smell enveloped me, insulating me from the smoldering hell I’d just left, where Leena had just buried her husband. Buried everything.

Zaul nudged me, awaiting my response.

I brushed him off. “Yeah. I’m good.”

He knew better. My face betrayed me. I was a long way from good. Even an inexperienced player like Zaul could read that bluff. I had to tell her. If I wanted any relationship with Leena, I needed to open the door on the closet in me that held this secret. Watching her dance and twirl and sweat and sing, I realized how completely I’d fallen for Leena. Evidence to the depth of my fall was my 180-degree gut reaction, which was not to keep my life a secret, but to tell her everything. Tell her now so there’d be no chance that I couldn’t and wouldn’t hurt her later.

I made up my mind that when the right chance presented itself, I’d open the door and turn on the light. Tell her everything. And save her from the truth of me.

Problem was, I never got the chance.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I’d often heard the warning but never really understood: For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Valle Cruces was holding a funeral for one of Nicaragua’s most beloved farmers. Word spread. Carrying with it the news that two gringos—one young with tattoos, recovering from a beating—were on the mountain and had been instrumental in this. Evil men reacted to that news differently from the majority of the population. You’d think that after looking over my shoulder for more than a decade that I’d have thought about that, but I had not. It had never crossed my mind. And while the majority of Nicaraguans joined the party and filled themselves at the table and drank their fill and laughed and sang and danced, others were not quite so happy. And those select few hid beneath the mango trees.

I never saw them coming.

*  *  *