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Seven years earlier, my father’s business had gone bankrupt.
The bank was about to foreclose, and they would have lost their home.
Mateo and I, newlyweds, took out a loan, assumed the debt, and bought the apartment to avoid foreclosure.
The deed was in both their names.
My parents continued living there because of our tolerance.
They didn’t pay rent, on the condition that they covered utilities and maintained a minimum level of cohabitation.
They never told anyone about it.
Daniela was allowed to believe that it was still “Mom and Dad’s house.”
And I was made to carry the guilt every time I hinted at setting boundaries.
I had put up with that for years.
But Mateo had been warning me for months that it was going to end badly.
As soon as he left the police station, he sent a legal document revoking his permission to use the apartment due to assault and coercion against one of the owners.
She also attached a copy of the deed and demanded payment for the water, electricity, and maintenance bills that we had been covering for some time.
Because my parents always found an excuse not to pay them.
The next day, he returned to the building with two police officers to collect my things, the folding crib and the medication that they had left upstairs.
I waited in the car.
With Valeria asleep on my chest.
From the window, I saw my mother turn pale.
When one of the officers asked her for her identification “as an occupant.”
I watched my father try to explain himself with a certainty that gradually dissolved as Mateo placed papers on the car’s trunk.
And I saw Daniela, in the middle of the building, reading the first page of the document.
Her eyes were wide open, as if the ground had split beneath her feet.
“Mom,” I heard him say, “tell me this is a lie.”
But it wasn’t.
And the worst was yet to come.
The following weeks were a slow-motion collapse.
First came the summons for the complaint.
Then, the notification of the civil proceedings to recover the property.
My mother thought it would be enough to call some aunts and say that Mateo was manipulating me.
That I was “sensitive because of hormones” and that I had exaggerated a domestic argument.
He didn’t count on Mateo keeping everything.
He gave the lawyer Daniela’s messages.
The loan receipts that had saved the apartment.
The bills we were still paying.
And, above all, a recording of the building’s intercom.
I couldn’t see the hair-pulling.
But I could hear my mother’s screams perfectly.
My father’s voice telling them to get me out of there.
And, finally, Daniela’s words when I was already outside on the street.
The building also had a camera at the entrance.
I could be seen leaving, bent over, with the basket in one hand and dragging my suitcase.
With that evidence, the case stopped seeming like a family fight.
My mother was convicted of minor assault and coercion.