You do not breathe for a second.
The room seems to narrow around you, the dark-paneled library suddenly too small to hold what Ricardo Mendoza has just said. Rain ticks at the windows like impatient fingers. Somewhere behind you, an old grandfather clock keeps moving forward as though nothing in the world has changed, as though your father has not just rearranged the entire gravity of the Herrera family from beyond the grave.
Valeria is the first one to recover.
“I’m sorry,” she says, though she sounds like anything but sorry. “Could you read that again?”
Ricardo adjusts his glasses with two careful fingers. He does not look confused. He does not look hesitant. He looks like a man who has spent decades standing at the edge of explosions without ever flinching.
“I said,” he repeats, slower this time, “that Don Alejandro Herrera leaves the remainder of his personal estate, the contents of his private office, and the property known as Hacienda San Gabriel, with all that is contained therein, to his daughter, Lucía Isabel Herrera.”
Your name sounds foreign in that room.
Not because it has never belonged there, but because nobody ever says it unless they have to.
Valeria leans back in her chair, her face composed in the way rich people learn to compose their faces when they are trying not to scream. Mariana bends down to retrieve her silk handkerchief, but her hand trembles. Uncle Esteban finally sets his phone face down and stares at you like you have turned into a different species in front of him.
You still do not know what Hacienda San Gabriel is.
