For a month, I disappeared.
Rodrigo told everyone I’d fallen into postpartum depression. Doña Teresa repeated at her lunches in Polanco that I “didn’t have the temperament to be the mother of an Arriaga.” And Valeria posted photos on Instagram with my husband, with flowers, with candles, with messages about “the miracles God sends when love is true.”
I didn’t answer.
I went to my parents’ house in Querétaro, a large property behind the first hardware store my grandfather opened with his own hands. My dad put security at the entrance. My mom cooked chicken soup and beans and made me eat even though I felt rage closing in my throat.
Every night I checked my son’s left foot.
The crescent moon was still there.
Small. Perfect. Mine.
I also started gathering everything. The lawyer requested copies from the hospital. The private doctor reviewed the records. The nurse Rodrigo had sedated woke up confused, and when she learned what had happened, she agreed to testify. Not for money. Out of shame.
“Mrs. Mariana,” she told me over video call, crying, “I should have protected those babies.”
“You still can,” I replied.
While I was recovering, the Arriagas were celebrating.
The baptism of the supposed “miracle” was announced as if it were a royal wedding. Mass in a church in Las Lomas, reception in a private garden, politicians, businesspeople, influencers, and all those people who smile when they smell money.
My mother-in-law carried the sick baby as if it were a trophy she had won.
“Look at him,” she said in the videos my cousins sent me. “Arriaga blood. Strong, beautiful, perfect.”
Then she uttered a phrase that pierced my heart:
“Not like the poor defective child Mariana tried to foist on us.”
I turned off my phone.
My dad wanted to call his lawyers immediately, but I stopped him.
“Not yet, Dad. Let them talk more.”
The day of the party, Rodrigo went up on stage with a microphone. He said that Valeria had taught him “the value of a second chance.” He said he would legally adopt his son. And in front of everyone, he promised to give her fifteen percent of the shares of the Arriaga Group.
That’s when I understood something.
They didn’t just want to steal my baby.
They wanted to use him to cover up a betrayal, secure an inheritance, and humiliate me forever.
At 8:20 that night, the private nurse I had paid to keep an eye on him from afar called me.
“Ma’am,” she said, her voice breaking. “The baby turned purple at the party. They’re taking him to Santa Elena Hospital.”
I felt a horrible chill.
Not for Rodrigo.
Not for Valeria.
For that sick child, whom his own parents had used as an ornament.
I arrived at the hospital an hour later, with my sleeping son in my arms and all my documents inside a black folder.
Rodrigo was in the emergency room, disheveled, yelling at a cardiologist.
“Save him! He’s my son! He’s Arriaga blood!”
The doctor looked at him with disgust.
“Sir, this baby had appointments, medication, and mandatory monitoring from day one. You canceled everything.”
Valeria raised her head, white as a sheet.
“It can’t be,” she whispered. “That wasn’t the baby who was supposed to get sick.”
And then everyone turned to look at me.
PART 3
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