He had not planned to say more than that, but the courtroom was silent and the judge did not stop him, and there was one more thing he found he needed to say — not to Griselda, he realized, but to the version of himself who had lived in her apartment, and to anyone else in any other apartment who might somehow, someday, hear it.

“For years,” he said, “she told me to learn my place.

And for years I believed there was a place I belonged in that was small and quiet and grateful for scraps, and that wanting more than that was a kind of sin.

That’s the thing I want to say out loud, while I have the chance.

It was a lie.

There is no such place.