Part Two: The Toast
Valeria’s post had been uploaded twenty-three minutes earlier.
She was at the Presidente InterContinental Hotel in Polanco — a place I knew because she had talked about it, the place she had been wanting to go since Rodrigo, her fiancé, had taken her there on their second anniversary and she had described the cocktails in considerable detail. In the photograph she was holding a flute of champagne, her head tilted back, mid-laugh. My mother was beside her with a champagne flute of her own, smiling the specific smile she used for photographs, the one that was slightly different from her real smile. My father had his arm around Rodrigo.
In Karla’s story — the next thing I saw, because once I started looking I couldn’t stop — she was in a red dress I hadn’t seen before, laughing with two other women I didn’t recognize, a cocktail in her hand.
The caption on Valeria’s post: Celebrating my little sister’s love.
The timestamp: twenty-three minutes ago.
Twenty-three minutes ago, I was watching them lower Mateo’s coffin.
I stood in the cemetery with my phone in my hand and I felt something happen inside me that I don’t have a precise word for. Not heartbreak — I had felt heartbreak before and it was hot and sharp. This was colder. This was the specific sensation of a long-held belief becoming unsustainable, of a story I had been telling myself for years — they are difficult, they are imperfect, but they are family and family means something — arriving at the edge of what the evidence could support.
Doña Lupita looked at me. She did not ask. She could see what was on my face.
“Here I am,” she said.
I put my phone in my bag.
When the cemetery worker approached to ask if they could finish, I reached into the bag — past my phone, past my keys — and took out Mateo’s blue wrestler. He had carried it to every hospital appointment. It had been on the tray table beside every transfusion. It had been in the pocket of his superhero pajamas.
I placed it on the coffin.
“I promise,” I said quietly, “that I will take care of what is yours.”
I didn’t know yet, at that moment, exactly what that promise would require.
My phone buzzed in the car, on the way home.
A message from my mother: We need to talk. Bring the trust documents tomorrow.
Not: I’m so sorry I couldn’t be there. Not: Mateo. Not his name. Just: bring the trust documents.
I looked at the message for a long time.
Then I typed: I buried my son today. I can’t talk about money.
Her response was immediate: Don’t be dramatic, Mariana. This is important for the whole family.
I set the phone face-down on the passenger seat and drove the rest of the way home in silence.
