In practical terms, through those long months, it had changed nothing about his daily humiliation; he had still slept in the shed, still eaten off paper plates, still asked permission for his own kitchen table.

But it was not nothing.

It was everything, in fact, because it meant that somewhere inside the defeated old man was a part that had not surrendered, a core of self that had gone underground rather than be extinguished, waiting.

The people who dismantle another person’s dignity are counting on total surrender, on the victim giving up completely, because a person who has given up completely can be made incompetent, can be declared unfit, can be finished.

Manuel had not given up completely.