“One day, you will walk out that door, and the world will try to tell you that you are less than. It will try to shrink you, to turn you into a statistic or a suspicion. Do not believe it. Between the world and you, there is me. There is your mother. There is every ancestor who survived the crossing, the cotton field, the street. They are the true space between you and the abyss.
Years later, Javier read Coates’s book in a cramped apartment above a laundromat. He wasn’t a reader. But a customer left it behind, and the title in Spanish snagged him like a nail. Entre el mundo y yo. Between the world and me. He devoured it in two nights, weeping silently so his wife wouldn’t hear. It was as if someone had finally handed him a map of the invisible war he had been fighting his whole life.
That was the only safety he could promise. And it was everything.
And between the world and the boy, a father held the space.
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