Roberto was what people would call a good man. He didn’t drink excessively, didn’t gamble, came home every night. On weekends, he took the kids to the park, helped Patricia with groceries, watched soccer with the neighbors. He was the kind of father who attended school meetings, who carefully saved a little money every month for the annual family vacation to Acapulco, who dreamed of someday being able to pay for his children’s university education.
His coworkers described him as serious but kind, meticulous with numbers, always punctual, never causing trouble. Life in Lindavista during those years was typical of working-class neighborhoods in Mexico City. The streets were always full of street vendors, the sound of garbage trucks mixing with the bells of sweet potato carts in the afternoons.
The Campos family lived in a two-story house with a red brick façade and a small garden in front that Patricia tended carefully, planting geraniums and bougainvillea that added color to the street. Neighbors knew one another, borrowed sugar when needed, watched each other’s children, and gossiped on street corners on Sundays after mass.
But beneath this appearance of normalcy, Roberto Campos carried a secret that was eating him alive—a secret that neither Patricia, nor his children, nor anyone close to him suspected. And that secret was about to explode in the most devastating way possible.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006, appeared to be an ordinary day. Mexico City woke up under its characteristic late-summer gray sky, when afternoon rain is almost predictable. Roberto got up at 6:00 a.m. as usual. Patricia heard him moving in the bathroom, the sound of the shower, his footsteps in the hallway. They had breakfast together as always—coffee and sweet bread—while the children were still asleep.
