That is what know your place means, in the mouth of a man like Luca.

It means: your standing exists because we allow it, and it ends when we withdraw our allowance.

And the thing he could not comprehend, the thing that undid him and his father both, was that I had never occupied a place granted by anyone.

My standing in the world was not on loan from the Vance family, or from any man.

I had built it myself, brick by brick, out of my own work and my own competence, long before Luca ever cried through a set of vows he did not mean.