Doña Teresa, my mother-in-law, had never accepted me.
In her eyes, I was always “the little public school teacher,” the girl from Iztapalapa who had somehow slipped into a family with a powerful name. Her youngest daughter, Fernanda, treated me the same way. Every family meal became a quiet humiliation wrapped in elegant words: my dress was “too simple,” my accent was “too provincial,” and they hoped my baby would “look more like the Mendozas.”
But while Julián was alive, no one dared to touch me.
Now he lay inside a dark wooden coffin covered with white lilies, and they smiled as if the funeral were only another business meeting.
Doña Teresa walked toward me holding a yellow envelope. Her heels struck the marble floor with sharp, cold clicks.
“Here is the truth,” she said, raising several papers for everyone to see. “A DNA test. That child is not my son’s.”
