Chapter 2 - THE DRIVE THROUGH THE NIGHT
The engine of Javier’s twin-turbo V8 sports sedan roared to life with a guttural, furious snarl that echoed through the empty underground parking garage.
He slammed the selector into drive, the tires screeching loudly against the polished concrete as he tore out of the facility, bypassing the automatic exit gate before it had even fully opened, smashing through the lightweight wooden barrier arm without slowing down.
He didn't care about the property damage. He didn't care about the speed limits, the traffic cameras, or the municipal police patrols.
All he saw was the image burned onto the retina of his mind: his mother’s hand twisted tightly into his wife’s hair, and that sinister, unlabeled amber glass bottle gleaming under the dim light of the nursery.
The city was a blur of streaking yellow streetlights and dark, towering concrete structures as he tore onto the Periférico freeway. He pushed the accelerator pedal all the way down to the floorboards. The speedometer needle climbed effortlessly: 120, 140, 160 kilometers per hour.
He kept the phone mounted on the dashboard, the live feed still playing.
"Come on, move, move!" Javier screamed at the empty road ahead, his knuckles bone-white as he gripped the leather steering wheel with terrifying intensity. Tears of pure, unadulterated rage and suffocating guilt blurred his vision.
How could he have been so blind?
How could he, a man who negotiated ruthless corporate acquisitions, who prided himself on reading people's hidden motives in high-stakes boardrooms, have missed the systematic destruction of his own wife inside his own home?
Memories from the past three months began flashing through his mind, recontextualizing every single conversation, every strange interaction he had dismissed as minor household friction.
He remembered coming home six weeks ago to find Valeria sitting in the dark dining room, her hands trembling so hard she couldn't hold a glass of water.
“She had another crying spell today, Javier,” Doña Leonor had announced smoothly, stepping out from the kitchen with a plate of warm food for him. “I had to take the baby into my room so he wouldn't be frightened by her emotional outbursts. She insisted on making dinner, but she burnt the roast completely. Her mind is drifting, son. Postpartum psychosis is very real. We must be patient with her weakness.”
He remembered three weeks ago, when Valeria had tried to talk to him in the bathroom while he was shaving.
“Javier, please... your mother... she takes Mateo away from me for hours,” Valeria had whispered, her eyes wide with terror, her hands clutching his forearm. “She locks the nursery door from the outside. She tells me I’m not allowed to touch him. She tells me I’m crazy...”
And what had he done?
God help him, what had he done?
He had put his arm around her, kissed her forehead, and said, “Honey, my mother is just trying to let you rest. You’re exhausted. You haven't been sleeping. Leonor has raised three healthy children; she knows what she’s doing. Just trust her.”
Javier let out a ragged, agonizing sob, striking the center of the steering wheel with the heel of his palm.
He had handed his brilliant, loving wife over to her executioner. He had validated her abuser’s narrative every single day because it was easier to believe that his mother was a saint than to accept that she was a monster.
On the dashboard screen, the scene in the nursery was unfolding with terrifying speed.
Doña Leonor unscrewed the black plastic cap of the amber bottle.
Valeria began to shake her head frantically from side to side, backing her body into the corner of the room, pressing her spine against the skirting board, clutching the crying baby so tightly against her ribs that Mateo’s tiny legs were pinned.
“No... no, Leonor, please!” Valeria gasped on the audio feed, her hoarse voice cutting through the car’s speakers. “Not again! It makes my head spin... it makes me sleep for twelve hours! I can't wake up when he cries! Please, I'm begging you on my knees, don't make me take it!”
“Shut your mouth!” Doña Leonor commanded, her voice icy and precise. “You will take three drops, just as you do every night. And when my son comes home tomorrow morning and finds you unresponsive on the floor while your child screams in hunger, he will finally sign the legal conservatorship papers I had his lawyer draft last week.”
Javier’s heart violently contracted.
Conservatorship papers.
Two weeks ago, his mother had brought a thick legal dossier to his home office, claiming that her family attorney in Monterrey had recommended setting up a medical trust and legal guardianship framework "just in case Valeria’s mental health deteriorates further." He hadn't signed them—he had told his mother he wanted to wait for a secondary psychiatric evaluation—but Leonor had been relentlessly pushing him to sign the documents every single morning over breakfast.
If he signed those papers, Valeria would lose all legal rights to her son. She would be declared mentally incompetent, institutionalized in a private facility in northern Mexico, and Doña Leonor would gain absolute legal custody of Mateo.
It wasn't just cruel. It was a calculated, cold-blooded abduction under the guise of medical intervention.
On the screen, Doña Leonor pinned Valeria’s head against the wall with her left forearm, using her weight to crush my wife’s shoulders against the plaster. With her right hand, she lifted a glass dropper filled with a clear, heavy liquid from the amber bottle, forcing the tip toward Valeria’s trembling lips.
“Drink it,” Leonor growled. “Drink it or I will drop this baby onto the floor right now and tell Javier you threw him!”
“NO!” Valeria screamed, a guttural sound of pure maternal agony.
Javier swerved his sports sedan past a slow-moving transport truck, running a solid red light at 150 kilometers per hour as he tore off the freeway and onto the winding, tree-lined residential avenues of Lomas de Chapultepec.
He was three minutes away.
Three minutes that felt like an eternity stretching over a fathomless abyss.
May you like
“Hold on, Valeria!” Javier roared at the screen, tears streaming down his face as he pushed the car to its absolute mechanical limit. “I’m coming! God forgive me, I’m coming!”
He rounded the final gated curve of his neighborhood, the tires screaming against the asphalt, his high beams cutting through the darkness, aimed directly at the wrought-iron security gates of his mansion.
