Skip to content 
I let out a groan because I felt a lash on the wound.
My father snorted, annoyed, as if I were making a scene on a whim.
“Get her out of here now,” he said. “
She’s making me uncomfortable.”
Daniela arrived ten minutes later with her stroller, a huge bag, and that usual half-smile.
She looked at my swollen eyes, the stained nightgown, the poorly closed suitcase by the door, and blurted out:
—Finally I’m going to have the room to myself,
without your drama.
I don’t remember exactly how I got downstairs. I only know that Valeria started crying, that I could barely see through my tears, and that the cold air outside cut my skin when I crossed the gate with one hand on my stomach and the other holding the bassinet.
Then Mateo’s car turned the corner.
He braked sharply when he saw me standing on the sidewalk, pale, disheveled, trembling.
She got out, left the pharmacy bag on the seat and looked first at my hands, then at my disheveled hair, then at the blood that was peeking out from under the fabric of my nightgown.
I told him just one sentence:
—They fired me.
Mateo looked up at my parents and my sister, who were still in the doorway. He didn’t shout. He didn’t make a fuss.
He reached into the glove compartment, pulled out a blue folder and his cell phone, and said in a voice so cold that even my mother took a step back:
—Nobody move.
They’ve just ruined their lives.
What was in that blue folder…
and why was that phrase the beginning of something that no one could stop?
Mateo didn’t waste a second arguing.
He helped me into the car with a gentleness that contrasted sharply with the severe trembling in my jaw.
He fastened Valeria’s bassinet and, before starting the engine, took three photos.
One to my hair pulled out at my temple.
Another to the bag lying on the sidewalk.
And a third to my parents and Daniela at the building’s entrance.
My mother started yelling that he had no right.
But Mateo didn’t even look at her.
He drove straight to the emergency room of the hospital where I had been discharged the previous morning.
There, when the nurse saw the tension in the scar and the state I was in when I arrived, she asked the doctor to check me again.
The report stated “worsening of post-surgical pain due to exertion”, “capillary pull with superficial injury” and “episode compatible with coercion in a recently operated patient”.
While they were cleaning me up and calming Valeria down, Mateo called the police.
Two officers took statements that same night.
I spoke from bed, my pulse still racing.
I repeated exactly the phrases of my mother, my father, and Daniela.
Mateo handed over the photos, the medical report, and my sister’s messages from the previous days.
In them, she insisted that her son “deserved the best room in the house” and that I “was just taking up space.”
When the officers asked why I was recovering at my parents’ house and not at my own, Mateo answered for me.
Our apartment was still under renovation.
And, since I thought I’d have company with my parents, I agreed to go there for a few days.
What the agents didn’t know, and what my family had been pretending to forget for years, was that that apartment in Ecatepec didn’t really belong to my parents either.