“No,” I said, and I stepped forward, and I made him look at me.

“I allowed you to keep your pride, Alejandro.

That is the only thing I ever did to you.

For fifteen years I allowed you to feel like the man of the house, because I thought that was what love required of me.

You are the one who took that gift and turned it, year by year, into arrogance, and then into cruelty, and then into a man who leans over his wife’s hospital bed and asks her to sign her life away before they open her skull.

I gave you pride.