My husband had been in his coffin only a few hours when my mother-in-law demanded our house keys. “Pack your bags, incubator,” she sneered, tossing a f3ke paternity test onto the coffin. “My son’s millions belong to his real family.” My husband’s lawyer entered with a projector. Then my husband’s face appeared on screen, and his first sentence made my mother-in-law collapse.

Julián Mendoza was not an ordinary man. He owned one of the most important technology companies in Mexico. His face appeared in magazines, he spoke at major conferences, and he signed contracts worth millions with banks and hospitals. But to me, he was the man who walked barefoot into the kitchen at two in the morning looking for sweet bread, the man who talked to our unborn child as if the baby could already answer him.

Doña Teresa, my mother-in-law, had never accepted me.

In her eyes, I was always “the little public school teacher,” the girl from Iztapalapa who had somehow slipped into a family with a powerful name. Her youngest daughter, Fernanda, treated me the same way. Every family meal became a quiet humiliation wrapped in elegant words: my dress was “too simple,” my accent was “too provincial,” and they hoped my baby would “look more like the Mendozas.”

But while Julián was alive, no one dared to touch me.

Now he lay inside a dark wooden coffin covered with white lilies, and they smiled as if the funeral were only another business meeting.