Your name is Teresa Morales, and at fifty-eight years old, you have learned that humiliation has a temperature.
It starts behind your ears, then moves down your neck, settling in your chest like a pot left too long on a flame. It is a heat made of whispers, glances, and the sick little smile people wear when they think they have measured your worth from across a room. You feel it the moment you step into the church in your old green dress and hear the silence around you change shape.
Not silence exactly.
