“Why must you work every night?” Mythili asks, her ever-proper English bleeding through, even in Spain. “So we have money to buy food and go to fun places on the weekends,” I reply as quickly and brightly as I can manage, wondering the same thing, her words tugging my heart in every direction. “Oh yes, because we wasted 55€ on gas that one weekend?”

Yes, Mythili, my maker of details, my memorizer of moments filled with groaning parents and frantic disappointment, where a simple trip to the beach cost more than I earn in a day (gas, tolls, parking, ice cream… we didn’t even buy real food!).

I am making this work, is what I want to say. I have to work every night because I am determined to make this work. I want to see this country, I want you to experience it, and we cannot stay if I don’t work, we cannot take a weekend in Barcelona, drive to Portugal at Christmas, or go to the Spanish circus if I don’t work.

Instead I gather her up in my arms and hold back the tears that have been absent for weeks (a miracle! After months of ever-present pain and ever-ready tears, it’s been weeks since I have felt them on my cheeks). One day you will understand, I almost say, but I know she won’t. She will be like me, thinking back on my childhood, wishing I had more time with my always-working parents. And she’ll remember these long evenings without her mother and wonder why I brought us here.

Just like me, cycling across town, entering one Spanish home after another where children scream at me, where people cancel on me whenever they see fit, cutting my paycheck for the week but leaving me with random gaps of time that I can’t quite fill, I will look back, I just might look back, and wonder why I brought us here.

But she can’t hear these doubts that sit like acrid lemon juice on the tip of my tongue. Instead, I breathe in the smell of her hair, whisper, “I love you,” and ask her to make an amazing plan for our weekend, no matter what it might cost. After all, it has already cost us enough.