PART 1
—Stop the truck right now, Alejandro! Stop now!
Valeria’s shrill scream cut through the silence inside the luxurious armored SUV. Alejandro pressed the gas pedal purely out of reflex. The tires screeched on the cracked asphalt of the sweltering state highway in Morelos, raising a thick cloud of burning dust around the black vehicle.
“Just look at that,” Valeria spat, leaning over the board, her eyes bl00dsh0t with contempt. “It’s that starving woman… your ex-wife.”
Alejandro turned his face toward the side of the road. And his world stopped completely.
Just a few feet away, under the relentless midday sun of Mexico, stood Ximena. She wasn’t the radiant woman he had loved. She wasn’t the elegant wife who walked beside him through the marble hallways of their exclusive mansion in Lomas de Chapultepec.
The woman before him was the portrait of a life shattered: worn clothes, sandals on the verge of breaking, her brown hair haphazardly pulled back, her skin burned by the sun, and a profound weariness etched on her face.
But there was something else. Something that made Alejandro’s hands begin to tremble on the leather-wrapped steering wheel.
Ximena carried two babies pressed to her chest, wrapped in old cotton shawls. Newborns. They slept, overcome by the stifling heat, wearing knitted hats and clearly worn clothing. Even so, even from a distance, Alejandro saw something that struck him like lightning:
They were blond.
They had his bl00d.
At Ximena’s feet lay a huge black plastic bag, half-filled with PET bottles and aluminum cans. His ex-wife, the woman to whom he had sworn eternal love before the altar, survived by collecting garbage to feed two children whose existence he was unaware of.
“Look at you, Ximena Duarte,” Valeria mocked, rolling down the electric window. “Collecting trash.
You expect us to feel sorry for you? Those kids are probably one of your lovers’.”
The word “lovers” brought back the memories with a jolt.
A year had passed.
Papers scattered around the office: fake multi-million dollar transfers, blurry photos of her entering a motel, and the final blow: the valuable diamond crucifix belonging to Alejandro’s late mother, found—at Valeria’s suggestion—among his wife’s underwear.
He remembered Ximena’s face on her knees, weeping uncontrollably.
“It wasn’t me, Alejandro.
Valeria is lying. Listen to me… I’m…”
But he, blinded by the pride of a wounded man, didn’t let her finish.
“Get her out of my house. And make sure she leaves without a single penny.”
A distant car horn brought him back to the present. Valeria took a crumpled 50-peso bill from her purse, rolled it into a ball, and threw it out the window.
“Here, beggar. Buy them some milk.”
The bill fell onto the loose soil. Ximena glanced at it for a moment. Then she looked up at Alejandro once more. There was no hatred in her gaze. Only devastating compassion.
She covered the two babies’ heads to protect them from the dust, picked up her PET bag, and continued walking along the shore, without saying a word.
Alejandro felt his soul being torn apart. He wanted to open the door, run to her, and beg for forgiveness. But Valeria kept talking, hysterical and smug.
Alejandro realized something terrifying: if he reacted at that moment without solid proof, Valeria would destroy any trace of what she had done.
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