Part 4 — I Found My Mother by the Brick Kiln, but the Owner Tore Up My Check and Smiled Strangely

I snatched the phone from Mariana’s hand.

“Who was speaking to you?” I asked.

“The person who knew my number had seen only the internal copy of the contract,” she replied.

Ezequiel sat with a satisfied expression. The copper key gleamed on the table in front of him.

“Before you accuse others, look after your own documents, Julian,” he told me.

I did not answer him anymore.

Mariana immediately called three phones. The first auditor did not answer. The second said he was withdrawing from the case. The third uttered only one sentence:

“I cannot put my family in danger.”

My mother stood by the window. She was touching my father’s stopped watch with her fingers.

“They are taking everything from us again,” she said.

“No,” I answered. “This time everything will remain with us.”

But saying that was easy.

That same evening, my company’s board of directors called an emergency meeting. Eleven faces appeared on the video-call screen, with a blue folder in front of each person.

“We want to cancel the contract,” said the chairman of the board.

“The forged signature is not mine.”

“Your seal is in the recording.”

“The seal can be stolen.”

“The market does not wait for evidence. It hears only scandal.”

The meeting ended with the company temporarily suspending my authority.

My mother lowered her head.

“You lost everything because of me.”

“I returned because of you,” I told her. “Those two things are not the same.”

The next morning, a hearing on temporary protection was held in court. Ezequiel sat in the courtroom in a black suit, as if stealing half the village were a business meeting. Beside him sat a new lawyer, but he spent the entire time silently examining the folders.

Mariana presented the first document.

“This is the original mother-and-son contract.”

Then—the video recording.

Then—the conclusion of an independent expert, who confirmed that the pages placed beneath the signatures had been glued on later.

Ezequiel stood up.

“My words were recorded in a private conversation!”

“You yourself confirmed that they were true,” Mariana replied.

The judge played the video.

Ezequiel’s own voice rang through the courtroom:

“The cemetery is mine too.”

Those words struck the walls and returned.

Ezequiel was looking at the screen. For the first time he heard his own voice the way we had heard it—cold, calm, merciless.

His lawyer closed the papers.

“I no longer represent this side,” he said.

Ezequiel turned toward him.

“What are you saying?”

“That you hid half of the matters from me too.”

Police officers entered the courtroom.

My mother took my hand. Her fingers were still rough, but they were no longer trembling.

“Do not look, my son,” she told me.

“Why?”

“Because his fall is not our victory. Our victory will be if tomorrow morning children in this village walk without fear.”

Ezequiel was charged with falsifying documents, coercion, fraud, and attempting the illegal appropriation of land. During the following months, the contracts of the other families were also examined.

Thirty-nine houses were returned.

The village water well was transferred to the municipality.

The kilns were closed until the safety rules were restored.

My contract was also restored, but I did not continue under the same conditions. I changed the company’s charter: in every project, local farmers and workers would have an ownership share.

We rebuilt the wall of my mother’s house from the beginning. Of the old bricks, we kept only one—the one to which blood-colored dust was stuck.

Six weeks later, in the morning, my mother sat on a chair in the yard cleaning salted corn. I was working at a small table in front of her when she asked me:

“Do you still want to show me the sea?”

“Now you decide when we will go.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Let us go tomorrow.”

We hung my father’s watch on the wall. I had its mechanism repaired, and it started working again. Its ticking sounded through the house as if the past had decided, for the first time, to move forward.

Three months later, instead of Monterrey, I stayed in the village. I opened a small office on the second floor of the old warehouse. In the mornings, children came to my window and looked at maps of the village water on the screen.

One girl drew me a house with a yellow sun on its roof.

“Is this your house?” I asked.

“No,” she answered. “It is our house. No one will take us away from here anymore.”

That day I could not say anything for a long time.

My mother attached the drawing to the refrigerator, exactly on the new refrigerator that I had brought her six years late.

The first snow came in winter. White flakes fell on Puebla’s soil as if the red dust were finally beginning to be washed.

Ezequiel called me once again.

It was an unknown number.

“You and I could have reached an agreement,” he said. “Things would not have gone this far.”

“Things reached you,” I answered.

“I can return the money to you.”

“That money was never yours.”

“Then think at least because of your mother.”

From the window I saw my mother crossing the yard, holding a small basket. She was wearing new, soft boots.

“Do not talk about my mother anymore,” I told him.

“Julian, in the end you will understand that you cannot change anything alone.”

“I have already changed what I could.”

“And you will leave nothing for me?”

“I left you everything that was yours.”

I ended the call.

Then I blocked the number.

My mother opened the door.

“Who was it?”

“A man who thought everything could still be bought.”

She nodded and put two glasses on the table.

In the evening I opened the old box. Inside was the small postal envelope in which my mother had put my first thirty-five thousand pesos six years earlier. The brown leaf had almost disappeared.

My mother ran her hand over the envelope.

“I thought you had thrown it away.”

“I could not.”

“Then why did you keep it?”

For a long time I looked at her hands. The same hands that had carried bricks, paid the debt, kept the house, and finally returned my truth to me.

“Because I thought you helped me begin life,” I told her. “Now I understand that you yourself began my life for me.”

She smiled.

Outside, the snow was still falling. The smoke from the old kilns could no longer be seen. The village was quiet, but this silence no longer resembled fear.

I placed the envelope on the windowsill. The brown leaf looked like a small but clear mark on the white snow.

My mother turned off the light.

And for the first time in six years, our house belonged to no one except us.