Armando stared at the town’s cobblestone street—the same colonial stones Rosa had swept countless times on her way to the store, the same ones that had watched their children grow. He wanted to invent an answer, a path, some certainty. But all he could find was an old, bone-deep fatigue.
—I don’t know, my dear… I don’t know anything anymore.
The worst part hadn’t been the bank or the mortgage. It had been the children. Fernando, the mayor, hadn’t even bothered to hide his irritation.
“You sort it out yourselves,” she had said, as if years of diapers, fevers, school runs, sacrifices, and sleepless nights were a debt already settled. Beatriz, the middle daughter, had been even more distant: “I can’t be responsible for your mistakes.” And Javier, the youngest… Javier simply never replied. Not a call. Not a message. Nothing. A silence so complete it hurt more than any scream.
They wandered without direction. They rested on park benches, watching families pass by: children laughing as they ran, couples carrying bags of bread, grandparents clasping their grandchildren’s hands. Rosa watched it all as if it belonged to someone else’s life, yet it scorched her from within, because she knew she had once been that mother—the one who rushed to the hospital when a child fell, who stayed beside a bed for an entire week when a fever wouldn’t break, who counted coins for notebooks, who sewed buttons late into the night so her children could go to school looking neat.
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