The April heat beat down on the walls of the social housing complex with a suffocating fury, but Valeria, barely 15 years old, wore a thick, gray sweatshirt, zipped up to her neck.
The girl shuffled along the chipped tile floor, her gaze fixed on the ground, dark circles under her eyes contrasting sharply with the ghostly pallor of her face. For four weeks, the cheerful girl who used to play soccer on the neighborhood’s dirt fields and laugh uproariously at the videos on her cell phone had vanished.
In her place remained a ghost who vomited her breakfast, felt dizzy when she tried to get out of bed, and cried silently when she thought no one could hear her.
Rebeca, his mother, noticed it from day one. True mothers have a radar for their children’s pain, an instinct that pierces their hearts.
One night, while serving dinner in the small kitchen lit by a single flickering bulb, Rebeca glanced at her husband. Ernesto sat at the table, devouring a plate of beans with chorizo, his eyes glued to the soccer game playing on the small television.
“Valeria doesn’t look well at all, Ernesto,” Rebeca said, nervously wiping her hands on her apron. “She’s been like this for four weeks now. She’s not eating, her stomach hurts a lot. We need to take her to get checked out.”
Ernesto didn’t even look up from his plate. He chewed slowly, swallowed, and let out a snort full of contempt.
“She’s exaggerating. At 15, everything hurts, everything tires them out, and they use everything to get attention. She probably doesn’t want to go to school or she had a fight with her friends.”
“She’s not faking it, Ernesto. I hear her crying in the early morning.”
The man slammed the base of the glass on the table, sending the silverware flying. His voice, harsh and authoritarian, echoed in the small kitchen.
“I told you she’s faking it. And I’m not going to waste a single penny of my salary on doctors because of a teenage tantrum. She’ll get over it when she realizes nobody cares about her.”
That night, the air in the house became unbreathable. Rebeca noticed that, upon hearing Ernesto’s shouts, Valeria shrank into the corner of the living room, hugging her knees, trembling like a leaf.
The teenager didn’t look up, and when Ernesto walked past her to go to the bathroom, the girl gasped and squeezed her eyes shut in terror. Rebeca felt a chill run down her spine, a visceral pang of panic she couldn’t quite explain.
A mother’s desperation doesn’t obey any man’s orders. The next morning, taking advantage of Ernesto leaving at 7 o’clock for his job at a mechanic shop on the other side of town, Rebeca took the savings she had hidden in an oatmeal container, put Valeria on public transportation, and they braved the heavy traffic to reach a private clinic in Guadalajara.
In the doctor’s office, the smell of rubbing alcohol made Rebecca’s stomach churn. The doctor, a man with thick glasses, passed the ultrasound scanner over the teenager’s taut belly.
Suddenly, the doctor stopped. His face changed. He frowned, abruptly turned off the monitor, and took off his glasses, rubbing his eyes with an expression of pure dismay.
The man lowered his voice, looked at Rebecca with a mixture of pity and horror, and whispered something that made the mother’s blood run cold:
—Madam… there is something inside her.
Rebecca felt the floor disappear beneath her feet. The silence in the room became deafening. It was the prelude to an abysmal nightmare, the chilling sensation that something horrifying, something Rebecca simply couldn’t believe, was about to happen…
The hum of the clinic’s air conditioner sounded like the roar of an engine inside Rebecca’s head. She gripped the edge of the metal desk, feeling like she couldn’t breathe.
“Something?” she repeated, her voice trembling, almost inaudible. “What do you mean? Is it a tumor? Is it serious?”
Read more on the next page…
