PART 1
—This house is no longer yours, Valeria. You have until Friday to get out.
Her mother said it with unbearable calm, as if she were merely announcing that dinner had gone cold and not throwing her own daughter out of the place where she had lived for the past 2 years. Valeria did not respond immediately. She left the spoon inside the coffee cup, lifted her gaze toward the dining table, and looked at each face in front of her one by one.
Her father, Ramiro, pretended to check messages on his phone to avoid looking at her. Her younger sister, Fernanda, was leaning against the wall with a smile so satisfied it was nauseating. And her mother, Patricia, wore that polished expression of an elegant lady from San Pedro Garza García, as if cruelty could also be dressed in good taste.
Valeria breathed slowly.
—We’ll see about that.
Nothing more. No shouting. No tears. None of the spectacle they were expecting.
Since childhood, Valeria had learned that in that family, silence was the only way to survive. Her older brother, Emiliano, had always been “the promise”: the son for whom doors had to be opened, contacts paid for, projects pushed forward. Fernanda was “the spoiled one”: the one who cried and got what she wanted. Valeria, on the other hand, was the one who had to understand, give in, work, grow up too early, and not be in the way.
While her siblings studied without worrying about anything, she had worked since she was 16. First in a café, then giving private lessons, later covering her expenses with temporary jobs while finishing university with loans and scholarships. The most painful part was not the lack of help. It was that they always made her feel guilty for needing it.
Everything changed 10 days earlier, when she received a call from a lawyer named Salcedo. Valeria thought it was a minor procedure related to the inheritance of her grandfather Ernesto, who had died years earlier. But in that elegant office in downtown Monterrey, the truth came crashing down on her like a wall.
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