Chapter 10: The Ten Business Days
The temporary apartment began to collect the small evidence of ordinary living.
Leo’s drawings appeared on the refrigerator with magnets I bought at the corner store. A plastic cup with his toothbrush stood by the bathroom sink. The emergency bag was unpacked into the single closet. None of these details were dramatic. All of them mattered. They proved that the space was being used by people who intended to stay longer than a single night.
Diego used the first quiet mornings to make calls about longer-term rentals. He came back with options that were modest and realistic—places with two bedrooms, older buildings, rents that would stretch us but not break us if the savings were recovered. I listened to the details, compared them against my own spreadsheet of remaining funds, and kept the conversation practical. Hope was useful only when it was attached to numbers.
Leo adapted faster than either of us. The absence of constant correction seemed to unlock something in him. He talked more at breakfast. He asked for second helpings without glancing around first. One afternoon he stood in the middle of the living room and shouted a nonsense song at the ceiling, then looked at me with mild surprise when no one told him to lower his voice. I told him the ceiling could handle it. He sang another verse.
Rocío sent a brief update on the third business day. Veronica had engaged a lawyer. The initial response was a denial that any loan had existed and a claim that the transfer constituted a voluntary family contribution toward the wedding. The handwritten note was described as an internal budgeting comment taken out of context. Rocío’s reply, which she copied to me, was dry and precise: the note’s language about no repayment expected and the matter being closed after the event would be evaluated by any mediator or court on its plain meaning, not on later reinterpretation. The ten-day clock continued to run.
Diego read the exchange over my shoulder and exhaled slowly.
“She’s going to fight it.”
“She already spent it. Fighting the return is the only move left that protects her version of the story.”
“And if she doesn’t pay?”
“Then we escalate. Rocío has already outlined the next steps. I’m not bluffing, Diego. That money was five years of work. It was the difference between depending on your mother’s house and having a door of our own.”
He nodded. The nod had become more reliable than his earlier promises. I did not confuse it with completion, but I no longer dismissed it either.
On the fifth evening Veronica’s sister called Diego. He put the call on speaker only long enough for me to hear the opening tone—concern for “the family’s reputation,” pressure to “resolve this privately before it damages Fernanda’s new marriage,” and a pointed remark about children being used as messengers in adult conflicts. Diego ended the call more quickly than he would have two weeks earlier.
“I’m changing my number if this continues,” he said.
“Change it. Then give the new one only to people who don’t treat Leo’s injury as a public-relations problem.”
That night after Leo fell asleep on the sofa with a library book open on his chest, Diego sat at the small kitchen table with his head in his hands.
“I keep thinking about how many times I told you she was difficult but harmless. How many times I asked you to absorb one more thing for the sake of peace.”
“She was never harmless,” I said. “She was only unchallenged. There’s a difference.”
He looked up.
“I’m going to the counseling appointment on Thursday. The one I mentioned. I need to understand why I kept choosing the path that cost you and Leo the most.”
“Go,” I said. “But understand that the demand letter and the apartment search and the decision not to return to her house are not waiting for your insights to mature. Those things are already the floor we’re standing on.”
“I know.”
May you like
Outside, the city made its ordinary night sounds. Inside, the temporary apartment held three people who were no longer performing a version of family life that required a child to apologize for hunger. The ten business days continued to count down. I checked the lock before bed, not out of the old hypervigilance, but out of the quieter habit of protecting a space that finally belonged to our decisions rather than Veronica’s.
Leo stirred and mumbled something about a red door again. I smoothed his hair and let him keep the color. We had not found the house yet. We had found the first room in which no one was allowed to push him for accepting what he had been offered.
