At 2 a.m., they drafted the termination notice.
At 3 a.m., Julián blocked the corporate cards.
At 4 a.m., they prepared the formal demand for immediate repayment: seven million, eight hundred thousand pesos, due within thirty days.
At 5 a.m., Mercedes signed the revised will. The estate went to three cultural foundations, two employees who had given her twenty years of loyal work, and her great-grandson Mateo, in a protected trust until his twenty-fifth birthday.
At 7:30 in the morning, a certified messenger drove to Lomas de Tecamachalco.
Valeria was still asleep when the envelope arrived.
Rodrigo opened it. He read it in the hallway, then read it again. When he looked up, the colour had gone out of his face entirely.
“Valeria,” he said through the bedroom door. “You need to see this.”
She threw a pillow at the door.
“Valeria.” His voice had something in it she hadn’t heard before. Not anger. Something quieter. “The house is being called in.”
She came to the door.
She read the papers.
Then she drove to Coyoacán and banged on her grandmother’s door for twenty minutes, yelling until the neighbours opened their windows and eventually two police officers arrived and strongly suggested she leave. She drove to the Roma Norte office and found that her access card had been deactivated. The guards — men she had dismissed by name in meetings, men who had absorbed her contempt for years with the professional patience of the employed — escorted her to the street in front of a lobby full of witnesses.
The WhatsApp messages came to light nine days later.
Rodrigo appeared at Mercedes’ door alone, haggard, with a black folder he held like something heavy.
“I didn’t know the extent of it,” he said, standing in the courtyard while the bougainvillea moved in the early afternoon air. “I knew she was ambitious. I didn’t know—” He opened the folder. “She was using her access to Editorial Arriaga’s author contacts to approach them privately. Offering better terms through a ghost agency she’d registered under a friend’s name.”
