Tomas Salazar was a retired General, a man who had spent forty years learning the exact difference between a fight worth having and a fight designed to make you lose.

And he had taught it to his daughter across a kitchen table in a language of few words.

Never spend your dignity, he told her, trying to win over someone who has already decided to despise you.

You will only exhaust yourself, and they will only enjoy it.

That was the first half, and Marisela had lived by it for years inside this family — had let the slights pass, the little humiliations, the way Sabetha introduced her at parties with a pause before her name as though she’d forgotten what a person like this was called.

She had let all of it go, because none of it had ever threatened anyone but her own pride, and her pride could take it.