d beside Julián’s casket with one hand resting on my eight-month pregnant belly and the other gripping the rosary he had placed in my palm on our wedding day. Only four days had passed since the accident on the road to Valle de Bravo. Four days since a police officer came to our home in Las Lomas and told me Julián’s car had gone off a cliff.
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.”
