Luis repeated each syllable, his voice catching. The world outside—the honking conchos , the barking strays, the crackling bachata from a neighbor’s radio—faded. There was only the page. Only the sound of a door opening.

To anyone else, it was just a thin, stapled workbook with a smiling boy named Nacho on the cover. But to Paola, it was a key. She had learned to read from that very book as a girl in 1972, her rough finger tracing “mamá,” “papá,” “mi casa.” Decades later, she taught her own children the same syllables: “ma, me, mi, mo, mu.”

“Abuela,” he whispered, “I need the Nacho book. The school has no copies left.”