There, when the nurse saw the tension in the scar and the state I was in when I arrived, she asked the doctor to check me again.
The report stated “worsening of post-surgical pain due to exertion”, “capillary pull with superficial injury” and “episode compatible with coercion in a recently operated patient”.
While they were cleaning me up and calming Valeria down, Mateo called the police.
Two officers took statements that same night.
I spoke from bed, my pulse still racing.
I repeated exactly the phrases of my mother, my father, and Daniela.
Mateo handed over the photos, the medical report, and my sister’s messages from the previous days.
In them, she insisted that her son “deserved the best room in the house” and that I “was just taking up space.”
When the officers asked why I was recovering at my parents’ house and not at my own, Mateo answered for me.
Our apartment was still under renovation.
And, since I thought I’d have company with my parents, I agreed to go there for a few days.
What the agents didn’t know, and what my family had been pretending to forget for years, was that that apartment in Ecatepec didn’t really belong to my parents either.
Seven years earlier, my father’s business had gone bankrupt.
The bank was about to foreclose, and they would have lost their home.
Mateo and I, newlyweds, took out a loan, assumed the debt, and bought the apartment to avoid foreclosure.
The deed was in both their names.
My parents continued living there because of our tolerance.
They didn’t pay rent, on the condition that they covered utilities and maintained a minimum level of cohabitation.
They never told anyone about it.
Daniela was allowed to believe that it was still “Mom and Dad’s house.”
And I was made to carry the guilt every time I hinted at setting boundaries.
I had put up with that for years.
But Mateo had been warning me for months that it was going to end badly.
As soon as he left the police station, he sent a legal document revoking his permission to use the apartment due to assault and coercion against one of the owners.
She also attached a copy of the deed and demanded payment for the water, electricity, and maintenance bills that we had been covering for some time.
Because my parents always found an excuse not to pay them.
The next day, he returned to the building with two police officers to collect my things, the folding crib and the medication that they had left upstairs.
I waited in the car.
With Valeria asleep on my chest.
From the window, I saw my mother turn pale.
When one of the officers asked her for her identification “as an occupant.”
I watched my father try to explain himself with a certainty that gradually dissolved as Mateo placed papers on the car’s trunk.
And I saw Daniela, in the middle of the building, reading the first page of the document.
Her eyes were wide open, as if the ground had split beneath her feet.
“Mom,” I heard him say, “tell me this is a lie.”
But it wasn’t.
And the worst was yet to come.
The following weeks were a slow-motion collapse.
First came the summons for the complaint.
Then, the notification of the civil proceedings to recover the property.
My mother thought it would be enough to call some aunts and say that Mateo was manipulating me.
That I was “sensitive because of hormones” and that I had exaggerated a domestic argument.
He didn’t count on Mateo keeping everything.
He gave the lawyer Daniela’s messages.
