“If Daniel dies while we’re away, you’re going to have to deal with everything, Mariana.”
Doña Rebeca Urrutia said it without raising her voice, holding her passport in one hand and a bottle of sleeping pills in the other. Outside the residence in San Pedro Garza García, two black SUVs waited with their engines running. The Urrutia family was going to Madrid “for urgent business,” but Mariana felt they weren’t fleeing a crisis. They were setting a trap.
Daniel Urrutia had been unconscious for six days in a hospital bed set up in the middle of the living room. His skin was pale, his lips dry, and his arms covered in IV drips. Mariana, his wife, barely slept, sitting beside him, listening to the beeping of the machines and the cold footsteps of the private nurse her father-in-law had hired.
The nurse’s name was Brenda. She always carried a black notebook where she wrote everything down.
“Mariana gave him the medication.”
“Mariana changed the IV.”
“Mariana stayed alone with the patient.”
Every sentence seemed written to condemn her.
Daniel wasn’t the Urrutia family’s favorite son. His father, Don Ernesto, boasted about his buildings, his bank connections, and his dinners with politicians. His brothers, Mauricio and Álvaro, wore expensive watches and talked about business as if the world owed them reverence. Daniel, on the other hand, had opened a cold storage company in Santa Catarina. He repaired equipment for packing plants, butcher shops, and avocado producers.
For his family, that was a disgrace.
At the last Christmas dinner, Don Ernesto raised his glass and said, “I toast to the children who actually understand what a surname means.”
Everyone laughed, except Daniel.
Rebeca looked at her son’s rough hands and said, “An Urrutia shouldn’t smell like machine grease.”
Mariana pressed her napkin under the table. Daniel just lowered his gaze.
That same night, Mariana overheard an argument behind the office door. Mauricio and Álvaro needed money. A lot of money. They had brought in investors for an import business from Asia, but the containers were stuck in Manzanillo, and the banks were refusing to lend to them.
“It’s ninety million pesos, Daniel,” Mauricio said. “Don’t be stingy.”
“My company isn’t a family piggy bank,” Daniel replied. “I have employees, contracts, and financed machinery.”
“Then sign as guarantor,” Don Ernesto demanded.
“Everything in writing, reviewed by lawyers.”
