Blood.

For those with blood split along the fault lines. For my Central and South American family. For my dad.

Dear Dad,

Last week, I pulled a card for the writing group I lead. “What do you want to write?” the prompt asked.

“What brought you to this page?”

It changes every minute. You know how it is—we’ve shared writing like we share DNA.

But as I sit here on this cold Colorado morning, days after watching Pretti take bullets in his back and Good’s blood dry on the airbags, I’ve decided: I want to write to you.

I want to write the things I haven’t said, or asked. For years, I’ve played a direct but polite daughter.

Maybe I’ve stayed quiet because I love you, and I don’t want us to end up like your other children, now gone or estranged.

Maybe I’ve remained coy because I know our blood shares the same boiling point.

I’ve seen both our types reach places we don’t come down from easily.

But avoiding the heat doesn’t lower the temperature—it just keeps the pot rattling.

To write to you at all, I have to write about the boil. I have to ask questions.

Because I don’t understand how the cordiform cavity you gave me the coding for can beat so different.

Is it because my heart was finished by hands you don’t recognize?

Did you know, Dad, that when you left, I was raised at other people’s tables? People who had crossed borders and learned new tongues?

They fed me milanesa and chorizo and took me to soccer games in your absence.

Did you know, Dad, that the whiteness you want in this country is exactly what has hurt your baby girl the most?

Did you know that I was sexually assaulted when I was fifteen, in Barbados?

It was a blond white man, by a bonfire. He tried to pull my pants down in the dark.

A local man intervened and stayed beside me until dawn.

Do you remember the Somali families you met in Maine—the ones you cooked with at the soup kitchen, the ones whose strength you admired as you broke bread together?

I want to know: how do you go from admiration to dehumanization?

Did the grains taste different then? Or has your memory just turned bitter?

Did you know, Dad, that I lost my virginity to rape when I was nineteen, in Stockton, California? It was a white graduate student who played water polo. When it was over, he slung me over his shoulder like a bulky bag of trash, and dropped me on the ground.

Your youngest daughter.

I want to ask: Can we deport him, instead?

Did you know, Dad, that when my life has been broken I’ve found solace and care in the people of Mexico?

While you were making jokes about fifty‑three of them suffocating in a truck, I was just across the border in Baja, rebuilding my soul in their company.

They welcomed me on their soil, without suspicion or cruelty.

And when I lived in Costa Rica and Nicaragua and hitchhiked every day for half a year, the only time I feared for my life was when a white man picked me up and took me to a drug deal at the end of a dead‑end street.

My friend Tess and I had to escape the car when he stopped at a bar.

We ran miles home in the dark, back to the safety of our Costa Rican families.

Is the narrowing a simple, binary story? Outsiders are dangerous, insiders are good?

Do you notice every crime that fits your fear but ignore every kindness that contradicts it?

Have you forgotten the Somali families you cooked with, or the men in Baja who helped put your daughter together?

Is this how ordinary people—good fathers even—get talked out of their own hearts?

This is not a letter about hating whiteness, or hating you.

It’s about the blanketing blindness. The blur that spreads when we stop seeing faces and start seeing categories.

Do you still see my face, Dad?

I didn’t want to write about “me” or “I.” But maybe if you can see me, you can see Alex and Renee, too.

If you can still see me, maybe you can hear me—my experiences—and remember some of yours. Maybe you can recognize the flicker of hope that people seek when they come here, searching for softer ground. The same ground you once sought.

And maybe this letter will help us see each other—and then, finally, see the world beyond us.

Or perhaps our blood, the last thing we share, will boil over and evaporate, leaving silence and space behind.