Twenty tables, always busy. We’d built that place from nothing—eighteen years of seven-day weeks and burnt hands. Antonio did all the cooking; I managed the front of house and kept the books. Our son, Daniel, worked there too. He was twenty-two, good with customers, never complained. We were a family. That’s what I thought.

Antonio kept cash in a safe in the back office. It was an old habit from growing up poor in Guadalajara, where his family had lost everything when a bank collapsed. “This I can see,” he’d say, patting the safe. “This I can touch.”