My name, Roberto Mendoza, functioned like a skeleton key across the city’s highest echelons. Boardroom doors swung open before I even reached for the handles. Competitors called me disciplined, a visionary, an unstoppable force of market nature—as though my ribcage housed a perpetually calculating ledger instead of a beating heart. The headquarters of Mendoza Holdings loomed over the coastline, a monument of reflective marble and steel where nobody dared to sweat unless it was from raw, unadulterated ambition. I existed in an ecosystem where problems evaporated the moment I directed my gaze toward them. I demanded unquestioning obedience, and for thirty-eight years, the world happily obliged.
So, when the machinery of my life experienced a minor glitch, my temper snapped like a dry winter twig.
