Chapter 3: The Fifty Million Mistake
“Neo…” Hassan said slowly, dragging out the syllables. His voice, which had previously boomed like thunder in that immense Santa Fe penthouse, now trembled slightly. “You’re 14 years old. That’s impossible.”
For the first time since I’d set foot in that office, I allowed myself a small smile. It wasn’t a mocking smile, but one of absolute certainty.
“The impossible, Mr. al-Mansuri,” I replied, holding his gaze, “is only the possible that has not yet happened.”
Silence once again enveloped the place. The distant noise of Mexico City traffic, the constant honking of cars trapped in the chaos of Avenida Constituyentes, seemed to belong to another universe. Up here, in this billionaire’s glass bubble, time had stopped.
Hassan’s gaze shifted to my mother for the first time in five years. And I say for the first time because before this moment, he had never truly looked at her. To him, my mother wasn’t human; she was part of the furniture. She was the broom, the damp rag, the smell of pine cleaner and bleach.
But now, what he saw before him wasn’t his cleaning lady. He saw a Mexican woman, her skin weathered by the sun and hard work, who had raised a genius while scrubbing other people’s floors. A mother who, like millions in our country, went hungry, traveled for hours on overcrowded public transportation, and sacrificed her entire life to give her son a chance to escape poverty.
“Neo…” Hassan repeated. His tone was now almost unrecognizable, stripped of all its arrogance. “Why did you come here today? Don’t you realize your mother could lose her job because of this? Do you know how easy it is for me to fire her without giving her a single penny of severance pay?”
I turned to look at my mother. Graciela pressed her lips together and gave me the slightest nod. Her eyes, reddened with exhaustion, shone with absolute confidence. There was no more fear.
“I came because I overheard you by accident in the hallway yesterday afternoon,” I said calmly. “You were shouting on the phone, negotiating a contract in Arabic with some Middle Eastern investors for the new refinery.”
Hassan’s face went completely pale. His olive skin lost all its color.
“So what?” he asked defensively.
—That you made catastrophic mistakes. Mistakes that were going to cost your company millions of dollars.
Hassan swallowed. He straightened up in his chair, trying to regain some of his lost authority.
—What nonsense are you talking about, kid? I don’t make mistakes in my own language.
“He used the word Mubashir when he should have used Musta’jil to indicate urgency in the delivery of the crude oil,” I explained, with the same calm I would use to explain math to an elementary school child. “And then, he confused Mirfak with Mihrab when talking about the infrastructure deadlines. They seem like minor errors, dialectal issues, but in the context of international corporate law, you completely changed the meaning of the clauses. You gave them the impression that there was no rush, and that the investment was a religious donation, not a business.”
Hassan slumped back against his leather chair. It looked as if all the air had been sucked from his lungs.
Suddenly, memories of that call hit him. He remembered how the investors on the other end of the line had remained silent. He remembered the confusion in their voices, the hesitation. He had explained it away, thinking the internet connection was failing or that the Gulf Arabs were too slow to understand their pace of business.
But the truth was something else entirely. His own mistakes nearly sabotaged a $50 million deal. And the only one in the entire corporation who’d noticed was me. The son of the woman who cleaned his bathrooms.
