You laughed while you threatened to throw my mother and father’s photographs into a dumpster.” I paused.

“No, Alejandro.

Forgiveness — if I ever manage it, and I might, for my own sake — does not mean handing you back the keys to my life.”

His parents began to plead too, weeping by the benches, that they were old, that they would lose the workshop.

“I was never your daughter,” I told them, “on any of the nights you called me barren and useless and a burden.

I wish you no harm.