“Before the sun rises, Valeria is going to look crazy… and that house of St. Angel will be ours.”
I heard that phrase from below the double bed, with the wedding dress crushed against the floor and the veil stuck on a board.
I, Valeria Castillo, had just married less than 3 hours ago with Andrés León, the man who for years made me believe that love could be quiet. The wedding had been in a house of the Roma colony, with white flowers, mariachi and my mother-in-law, Doña Rebeca, crying in front of everyone as if she really loved me.
“You’re my daughter,” she said in her ear.
How easy he had been given to lie.
I hid under the bed for an innocent joke. Andrés went down to the lobby saying he forgot his watch. I thought that when I came back, he would come out suddenly, he would laugh and that would be our first anecdote as husbands.
But the first one to enter was Rebecca.
I recognized his silver sneakers and his expensive perfume.
“I’m up there,” he said on the phone. Valeria’s fool doesn’t suspect anything. She’s probably in the bathroom taking off that poor bride makeup.
A woman’s voice answered on speakerphone:
Did he sign everything?
Rebekah let out a giggle.
“Enough. Andrés just needs to make her unstable for a few days. Then we scare him with a doctor, with the family and with a supposed nervous episode. He’s going to hand over the house alone.
The house.
The house of St. Angel that I had bought 4 months before the wedding. An old property, with bougaimbilias at the entrance and a courtyard where I imagined Sundays with pot coffee, sweet bread and children running.
Andrew thought we bought it together.
The truth was another: I had paid it full.
What he didn’t know was that my full name was not Valeria Castillo, but Valeria Montes Castillo. Nieta de Amalia Montes, founder of a well-known family construction company in Mexico City. My grandmother taught me that if someone loves you by your last name, she doesn’t love you. That’s why he lived simple, worked in a clinic in Coyoacán and never talked about family money.
Andrés thought I was alone.
And that’s why he dared.
