“There goes the old man. Ever since you got married, your old lady’s been keeping you on a short leash.”
I didn’t answer him. I went straight to the kitchen, carefully took the child from Mariana, and said, “Sit down. I’ll take care of it.”
And then my mother uttered the phrase that ignited everything:
“Now it turns out the daughter-in-law can’t even cook? That’s what she’s there for.”
I turned slowly and looked her in the eyes.
“No one is going to treat my wife like a servant.”
The silence became so heavy that even the bubbling of the pot sounded like a threat. But I didn’t yet know that the worst was yet to come. And what I was about to discover that very night was something that would change my life forever.
PART 2
That night, no one ate dinner in peace.
My mother cried, my father called me ungrateful, and Óscar started saying that Mariana was poisoning me against “my real family.” Mariana, trembling, still whispered to me, “Just leave him, Ale… I can handle it.” And those words hurt me more than all the shouting combined. Because a woman only says “I can handle it” when she’s already broken.
I gave them two days to leave. My father responded with a threat disguised as pride: “If you choose your wife, stop calling me father.” My mother put on her usual show, and Óscar slammed his fist on the table, saying I was going to regret it. I didn’t argue anymore. I picked up Emiliano, put Mariana to bed, and watched them both sleep, exhausted.
That’s when I opened the bank app.
I don’t know why I did it. Maybe because of something Óscar said, maybe it was pure intuition. But I started checking my transactions, and my stomach lurched. There were several transfers I’d never made. They weren’t regular payments or household expenses. They were separate amounts, spread out over different weeks, totaling almost 100,000 pesos.
I sat up straight in bed.
