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.”
When Alejandro told me that night, sitting at my small wooden table over a plate of simple beans and tortillas, my blood ran cold.
“She’s going to starve us out,” I whispered, my hands trembling. “She wants to watch you break so you’ll crawl back and beg for her forgiveness. She wants to prove that I ruined you.”
Alejandro looked at his hands, rougher now than they had been three weeks ago. A dark, dangerous look crossed his face. “She thinks money is the only language that matters. She forgets that I am the one who designed the Mendoza Group’s overseas investment structure. I know where the foundations are buried.”
The next morning, Alejandro didn’t look for a job. Instead, he used my old, lagging laptop to log into a secure encrypted database he had built years ago for his father’s estate.
