PART 1
“Get that girl off my son before someone takes a picture!” Beatriz Alcázar shouted from the terrace, as if a three-year-old girl were a threat to the most powerful surname in Nuevo León.
Alejandro Alcázar opened his eyes beneath the old oak tree and took a few seconds to process the scene. Sleeping on his chest was Sofía, the daughter of Fernanda Ruiz, one of the cleaning staff at the family residence in San Pedro Garza García. The little girl’s curls were plastered to her forehead, she wore a wrinkled yellow dress, and her tiny hand was closed over Alejandro’s shirt, right above his heart.
Alejandro wasn’t really asleep. At thirty-four, he ran three companies and was featured in magazines as the most envied heir in northern Mexico. But when the pressure got to be too much, he’d hide under the oak tree his father had planted and pretend to be asleep to escape contracts, phone calls, and self-serving friendships.
That afternoon he’d heard small footsteps, then felt Sofía settling on top of him like she’d found the safest place in the world.
“Hello,” she said when he opened his eyes.
—Hello, shorty.
—Were you asleep?
—I was pretending.
—Why?
Alejandro didn’t know how to answer. Nobody dared ask him such simple questions.
Minutes later, Fernanda came running in, pale, hands still damp from mopping the porch. The nanny who watched Sofía had gotten sick, and she’d had no one to leave her with. She’d brought her daughter along secretly, because losing that job meant not being able to pay rent on her small apartment in Santa Catarina.
—Mr. Alejandro, please forgive me. It was an oversight. I swear it won’t happen again.
He sat up carefully, careful not to wake the girl.
—You don’t have to apologize.
Fernanda looked at him like she’d misheard.
—I need this job.
—And you’ll keep it.
Alejandro ordered the old playroom in the east wing prepared so Sofía could stay there whenever Fernanda couldn’t find anyone to watch her. He sent for storybooks, wooden blocks, a little bed, washable paints. For the first time in years, that part of the mansion filled with laughter again.
Over the following days, Alejandro invented excuses to visit the room and help build towers Sofía would topple with laughter. Fernanda, still wary, started to smile at him.
But Beatriz was watching from a distance.
A widow obsessed with appearances, she’d decided her son should marry Camila Sada, daughter of an influential family. His closeness to a domestic worker was, in her view, “a class scandal.”
Thursday afternoon she found Alejandro under the oak tree with Sofía asleep on his chest again, Fernanda sitting a few meters away folding laundry.
“This ends now,” Beatriz said. “That woman is using her daughter to worm her way into your life.”
Alejandro stood up.
—Don’t ever talk about them like that again.
Beatriz smiled coldly, pulled out her phone, and called the head of security.
—Fire Fernanda right now. Check her things before she leaves. Women like her never leave a rich house empty-handed.
Fernanda hugged Sofía as two guards approached. Beatriz pointed at her bag.
—Open it. I’m sure we’ll find the real reason she brought her daughter here.
When one of the guards reached in, he pulled out a diamond bracelet Fernanda had never seen before.
And what Beatriz did next was so cruel that Alejandro realized this humiliation was only the beginning.
