“I have dates.

I have times.

I have amounts,” Carmen said.

“I know exactly how we have been treated in our own home, Veronica, because I wrote every bit of it down, night after night, in the shed, while you slept in my bed.” And Alvin looked at his mother, this quiet seamstress who had been reduced to eating off paper plates in a shed, who had lost her cards and her bedroom and her autonomy, and who had, through all of it, kept a meticulous, dated, handwritten record of every indignity, waiting for the day someone would come who could read it.

Veronica had mistaken his mother’s silence for weakness.