A visiting sister from another house, meaning only kindness, had begun to speak of Amparo’s ordeal as a trial God had sent to strengthen her — the sort of thing pious people say, the sort of thing Amparo had heard a hundred times about a hundred sorrows.

And Amparo, quietly but without any hesitation, had stopped her.

“Please don’t tell me what it was for,” she said.

“No one gets to decide that but me, and I haven’t decided yet, and I may decide it was for nothing at all — that it was simply a wrong done to me by a cruel man, and that the only meaning in it is the meaning I make by refusing to let it define me.

You may find that hard to hear.

But I have had enough of other people assigning meaning to my life while I slept through it.

Whatever this was, it is mine to name.” The visiting sister had gone quiet, a little wounded.