“If your wife dies tonight, at least answer the phone, you coward.”
Those were the first words I heard at 2:17 a.m.
I was lying in a luxury suite in Monterrey, the kind of room where the floor-to-ceiling windows framed the glittering ocean and the sheets felt like spun silk. The air smelled of expensive champagne, musky perfume, and the quiet, intoxicating scent of betrayal.
My phone had been buzzing relentlessly on the marble nightstand. I had ignored the first three calls. But when the caller ID flashed Mauricio for the fourth time, irritation finally overpowered my desire for sleep. Mauricio was my best friend. My brother in everything except blood. He was the only man who knew exactly where I had come from, which meant he was the only one who truly understood how far I had fallen.
I answered the phone quietly, keeping my voice low and annoyed. “What do you want, Mau? It’s the middle of the night.”
His voice was a blade of ice. “Where are you, Marcial?”
That hit me harder than it should have. Marcial. My own name sounded foreign coming from him, stripped of its usual warmth, as if he were reminding me of the hungry, desperate boy I used to be.
“I’m in Monterrey,” I lied smoothly, the practiced deception rolling off my tongue. “At the business conference. I told you this.”
“Don’t lie to me,” he snapped, the sound of sterile, echoing hospital corridors bleeding through the speaker. “Irma is in the hospital.”
Irma. My wife.
The woman who had stood beside me when my pockets were lined with lint and unpaid bills. The woman who had quietly pawned her grandmother’s gold earrings just so I could register the permits for my first company. The woman who stayed when our apartment’s electricity was cut, when the fridge held nothing but tap water, when the bankers laughed at my ambitious blueprints. She had helped build the powerful man I had become.
And she was the woman I currently treated like a fading ghost.
“What happened?” I asked. I didn’t ask with panic. I didn’t ask with love. I asked with the heavy, irritated sigh of obligation.
Mauricio’s breathing was ragged. “She collapsed. Doña Teresa called me. I brought her to the emergency room. It’s a ruptured appendix, Marcial. Severe sepsis. They’re rushing her into surgery right now, but they need next-of-kin authorization.”
I sat up slowly. Beside me, Valeria stirred under the Egyptian cotton. The ambient light caught the diamond bracelet on her wrist—a bracelet I had bought three days ago using the platinum card tied to the account I shared with my wife.
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