Gus came home yesterday. Today, he brought me over to see him, without Silvia. He looked so...worn out. Just physically weak and exhausted. I asked him what had happened, and all he would tell me was that he'd been ill while in Mexico. There seemed to be a new light in his eyes too, but it was not a light full of life. It was something more like...a sparkling of malice, a kind of satisfaction. It frightened me to see it. He was half-reclined in a chair in the living room when I came in, and he asked me to sit beside him. Taking a chair from the table, I did so. When he spoke to me, his voice was tired and measured.

"Do you know why my restaurant is called 'Los Pollos Hermanos'?" he began.

I replied that I didn't. I thought it was simply a creative name.

"I started it with a friend," Gus said, "I met him some time after we lost our family—after I lost you. He was like a brother to me...he was the only family I had..." He trailed off, his eyebrows drawing together in pain.

"What happened to him?" I asked.

"He died." Gus let out the two words like a breath, and a shade of disgust passed through the grief in his face, darkening the lines around his mouth and barely curling the corners of his lips.

"How?" The question escaped me before I could wonder if it too prying, but to my surprise, he answered.

"He was murdered."

My heart ached for him. I took his hand, and he curled his fingers down around mine, so tightly that it hurt. "I'm sorry," I said. And that was all. I asked no more, and he told no more but simply sat and stared out the window, holding my hand with that strange light in his eyes.

At last, he turned his face toward me and said, in a voice low and sharp and a flame, "It will never happen to you. As long as I live—beyond my life—nothing bad will ever happen to you again, mi hermana. Not you, not Silvia. You are safe." The last three words he spoke with emphasis on each, with frightening intensity.

After this, he seemed to recover himself, standing up and straightening his tie, which he even wore at home, beneath a dark blue sweater. When he looked at me again, he was calm. He put on that polite smile which never seemed to warm his eyes and asked me what we should make for supper.