PART 1
“Get on your knees, admit you stole the necklace, and get out of my house before I call the police.”
That’s what my husband said after slapping me in front of his mistress.
The blow was louder than the shattering of the broken tabletop. My cheek burned, my hand bled from the shards of glass, and yet what hurt the most was seeing him standing there in front of me, proud, as if he had just defended his family’s honor.
Beside him stood Brenda, wearing a red dress that was too tight and a fake look of fear on her face. Behind him, Doña Mercedes, my mother-in-law, held an empty velvet box.
“The emerald necklace belonged to my mother,” she said, looking at me as if I had soiled her living room just by breathing. “A woman like you should never have touched it.”
The living room of the mansion in Las Lomas was filled with paralyzed employees. No one said a word. Neither the driver, nor the maid, nor the gardener who had come in after hearing the commotion.
I looked at Mercedes.
“I didn’t steal anything.”
Then Andrés hit me.
Brenda gently touched his arm.
“Honey, it’s not worth it. Some people never learn how to behave in fancy places.”
Mercedes smiled.
“I always said it. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear…”
For four years I had put up with it. Comments about my family from Puebla, about my brown purse, about the way I spoke, about my shoes, about my background. They said I should be grateful I was part of the Armenta family.
But they forgot something.
I was the one who organized the dinners with investors. I covered the debts before the banks came knocking. I had signed guarantees so that Grupo Armenta wouldn’t go under. I had asked my father, Alejandro Escalante, to rescue Andrés’s company when no one else wanted to lend him a penny.
And even then, to them, I was still the intruder.
The lucky poor woman.
The wife who was supposed to smile and keep quiet.
That night, something inside me went out. It didn’t break. It ended.
I grabbed my brown purse from the chair. The same one Mercedes called my “market bag.”
I walked toward the door.
Andrés laughed.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
I stopped and turned around.
“Tomorrow, all of you are going to apologize to me.”
First there was silence. Then they mocked me.
Brenda giggled.
“How embarrassing.”
Mercedes touched her chest.
“Poor thing. She’s lost her mind.”
