And that loving your family never means surrendering your dignity.”

Alvin looked at that small rusted key on the high shelf for a long moment, and then at his father, and then out through the open door at the garden where his mother was laughing in the sun, and he understood that the key was not a trophy of what they had survived but a teaching, kept in plain sight so it could not be forgotten.

His parents had learned, at terrible cost, the two truths engraved in it, and they meant to keep learning them, every day, by looking at the key that had held their rescue.

And Alvin had learned something too, standing there, that he intended never to forget.