”
But reality is a cruel master, and it didn’t take long to find us.
By midday, Alejandro’s phone died. Not from a lack of battery, but because Doña Beatriz had remotely deactivated his corporate account and cut his service. When we went to a bank to withdraw whatever personal savings he thought he had, the teller looked at Alejandro with a mixture of pity and fear.
“I’m sorry, Señor Mendoza,” the teller whispered, looking around nervously. “The primary accounts are tied to the family trust. Doña Beatriz placed a legal freeze on them two hours ago. We cannot authorize any withdrawals.”
Alejandro stood frozen in the pristine bank lobby. For the first time, I saw a flicker of panic in his eyes. He had no cash. No working phone. No car.
We had to take the crowded, suffocating collective bus back to my tiny, rented room on the outskirts of the city. It was a world Alejandro had only ever seen through the tinted windows of his armored SUV. The smell of exhaust, the loud vendors, the crushing weight of the working-class crowd—he looked like an astronaut who had suddenly dropped onto a foreign planet.
Yet, he didn’t complain. Not once.
When we got to my room—a space barely large enough for a twin bed, a small stove, and my business textbooks—he sat on the edge of the mattress and looked around.
“It’s small,” I said, a deep sense of shame washing over me.
“It’s quiet,” he corrected softly, looking up at me with a tired smile. “And my mother isn’t here.”
For the next three weeks, we lived a life born of pure survival. I went back to my night classes, and during the day, I managed to find a temporary cleaning job at a local hotel. Alejandro, a man with a master’s degree in corporate finance from Europe, spent his days walking the pavement of Mexico City, submitting resumes.
But Doña Beatriz’s shadow was long, and her malice was infinite.
Every time Alejandro made it to a second-round interview at a major financial firm, the offer would mysteriously vanish by the next morning.
“Your mother’s maiden name is on the building of the regulatory commission, Alejandro,” a sympathetic hiring manager finally confessed to him in secret. “She made a call. She told the partners that if anyone hires you, she will pull all Mendoza Group assets from their portfolio. You’re blacklisted in this city.”
