Three men in paramedics’ uniforms came into the apartment, and from the first moment nothing about them was right.

Santiago reached for his phone to call for help, and Griselda took it from his hand.

“Your aunt is worried about you,” one of the men said, in the flat voice of someone reciting a line.

“We’re taking you somewhere you can rest.” “I’m not sick,” Santiago said, and heard his own voice climb toward panic.

“She wants me locked away before I turn eighteen — that’s all this is —” But Griselda was already signing the paper, and the men were already moving, and what happened next Santiago would never be able to describe in order afterward, only in fragments: the restraint, the sting of a needle he had not consented to, the room going soft and distant at the edges, and his own voice, thick and failing, saying the only words that still mattered to him.

“No.