Part Three: What I Told Myself About Valentina
She had been with me through all of it.
She had grown up in the succession of apartments that got better as the years got better — the small one in Mexico City, then the larger one, then the first house. She had been in the business, in a sense, from the beginning, in the way that children of single parents who are building things were always in the business: present at the kitchen table while I did accounts, aware of the vocabulary of inventory and margin and supplier negotiations before other children her age knew what those words meant.
She was sharp, as I had suspected she would be from the opinions on her face in her first hours of life. She was direct. She had a quality of self-possession that I recognized as her own and not something I had taught her — something she had arrived with and developed.
We were close in the way of two people who had been each other’s primary relationship for years, and also occasionally difficult in the way of mothers and daughters who were too similar in certain ways to always be comfortable.
But she was with me.
She was always with me.
This was what I believed.
I need to explain the hospital, because the hospital is where the story changes into something I was not prepared for.
