It was a humid morning in May, the kind where your skin sticks to your clothes before you’ve made it past the mailbox. I had walked four blocks with baby Sergio in his stroller to Fran’s house, something I did often without thinking. I didn’t call first. I never had to. Fran had always been my safe place, my honorary aunt, my other mother. That morning, though, I wasn’t walking into comfort. I was walking straight into a storm.

Fran answered the door flushed and sweating, her eyes already lit...