Three Days After the Divorce, My Ex Mocked Me When He Saw an Old Man with Me — Then the Color Drained from His Face

“Three days have passed since the divorce, and you have already found some old man to pay for your dinner? You quickly learned how to survive without a husband.”

Camila’s voice carried through the restaurant on Reforma Avenue so loudly that conversations at several tables immediately stopped. I did not raise my head. In front of me sat my father, Arturo Mendoza—gray-haired, impeccably dressed, and so calm, as if there were not a woman before him who was stepping on the most painful place in my entire life.

Camila clung to Alejandro de la Vega’s arm. A diamond bracelet glittered on her wrist.

I recognized the bracelet.

Several months earlier, I had found it in the safe of our house. Alejandro told me it belonged to one of his clients and had been left there by accident. I believed him then, because a wife always wants to find the truth in her husband’s words.

Now his former lover was wearing the truth.

“Sir, be careful,” Camila continued, looking at my father politely but with disgust. “Valeria plays the innocent woman very well. The de la Vega family supported her for three years, and as soon as they threw her out of the house, she found a new wallet.”

Alejandro furrowed his brows.

“Camila, enough.”

But then he turned toward me. His gaze was still as cold as on the day he signed the divorce papers.

“Valeria, you are no longer my wife, but you still should not allow yourself to humiliate yourself like this.”

Laughter rose inside me.

For three years, his mother, Beatriz, called me a “girl without a surname.” She told me what to wear at family evenings, whom to sit with, and which room not to enter. Once, in front of guests, she told me that being in the de la Vega family was an honor I did not deserve.

And I endured silently.

I endured Alejandro’s nights when he said he had a business meeting. I endured Camila’s messages, which at first looked like messages that had arrived by accident, and then turned into dozens of photographs in a single day.

And still, I did not cry in front of them.

I looked at my father.

“Father, let’s go.”

The smile disappeared from Camila’s face. Alejandro blinked several times.

My father slowly stood up. The metal band of his watch caught the sunlight.

“To avoid misunderstanding,” he said calmly, “Valeria is my daughter.”

Alejandro’s face suddenly tensed.

He recognized Arturo Mendoza—the president of the Vanguardia Group, owner of one of the country’s most influential private associations, and the man whose meeting Alejandro’s father had been trying to obtain for two years.

Camila took one step back.

“That is impossible…”

“The fact that you were never interested in who I was does not mean I did not exist before meeting you,” I answered.

I walked past Camila and looked at her bracelet.

“Take good care of it. Apparently, you love things that other women have already abandoned.”

The next morning, Alejandro and Beatriz came to my father’s house in Bosque de las Lomas. When the iron garden gate closed behind them, I realized that this visit would not come only from a desire for revenge.

As soon as he entered the living room, Alejandro asked me:

“Why did you never tell me who your father was?”

“If you had known, would you not have deceived me?”

He found no answer.

Beatriz raised her chin.

“You were part of our family for three years. Alejandro came here to offer you a fresh start.”

“A fresh start?” I laughed. “With the same husband, the same lover, and the same lies?”

Alejandro clenched his teeth.

“We can still fix everything.”

I looked straight at him.

“Because you love me, or because the de la Vega development company needs temporary financing from my father’s group to complete the technological complex?”

His face changed.

That was the real reason.

I placed a blue folder on the table. Inside were documents about the loan that could save their project. Alejandro turned to the last page. Within several seconds he went pale, then looked up at me.

“You…”

“Yes. The authorization…”

“The authorization depends on your signature,” I finished.

Such silence fell over the room that every tick of the clock hanging on the wall could be heard clearly. Alejandro’s fingers gripped the edge of the blue folder. Beatriz looked at me as if she were seeing not a daughter-in-law for the first time, but a door that only I could open.

“This is a business decision,” she said. “Personal resentment should not affect the company.”

“You yourselves touched personal resentment when my husband gave another woman your family’s money before my eyes.”

Alejandro looked sharply at me.

“Be careful, Valeria.”

“I have been your ex-wife for three days. Is this the first time you are telling me to be careful?”

My father stood by the window. Behind him, the city’s noise gathered against the glass like a dark wave. He said nothing. That affected me more strongly than any threat.

Alejandro struck the folder with his hand.

“If you do not sign, hundreds of employees will lose their jobs.”

“Do not shift this responsibility onto me. Your father built the company, and you almost destroyed it during the last year.”

Beatriz snickered.

“Now you are an expert too?”

“No. I simply read the reports you never read.”

I took a small copper key from my bag. I had had it since childhood. It had a small moon-shaped mark on it, because my father had told me that every closed door would one day be waiting for me with its own key. I placed the key on the table.

“This is not only a loan agreement.”

The tension passed across Alejandro’s face.

“What do you mean?”

“You will receive the answer tomorrow.”

“I need the signature today.”

“Then today you should have tried telling the truth.”

He came toward me. My father only took one step forward, but Alejandro immediately stopped.

“Valeria, you do not know what you are doing.”

“Perhaps for the first time I know exactly.”

They left at four in the afternoon. When the door closed, my hands began to tremble. I went into the kitchen and turned on the faucet, although I did not need water. I simply wanted no one to hear the sound of my breathing.

My father stopped at the door.

“You can refuse this deal.”

“I know.”

“You can sign and help save them.”

“I know.”

“But before you decide, you must know everything.”

At seven in the evening, his lawyer, Sandro Kvaratskhelia, came to the house. He placed a black box on the wooden table. Exactly the same small moon as on my key was engraved on the lock of the box.

“Your father kept this ten years ago,” Sandro told me. “But it could be opened only after your marriage to the de la Vegas ended.”

“Why?”

Sandro looked at my father.

“Because some truths should be told to a person when she steps out of someone else’s shadow.”

I put the key into the lock. The metal clicked softly.

Inside the box were a small voice recorder, several stamped sheets, and a photograph. In the photograph, I was twelve years old, together with my father in front of his first factory. In my hand I held the same moon-shaped key.

“What is this?” I asked.

Sandro turned on the recorder.

At first, only rustling could be heard. Then Alejandro’s voice sounded.

“Valeria knows nothing. If we obtain her signature, all the financing will come under our control.”

Beatriz’s voice followed.

“And if she refuses?”

“Then Camila will make sure everyone thinks she stole the money.”

The recorder nearly fell from my hand.

My father lowered his eyes.

“The recording was made three weeks ago. The meeting took place in one of our own offices.”

“You knew?”

“I had suspicions. Now we have evidence.”

Sandro handed me a second sheet.

“It says here that the land and the main shares of the technological complex have already been transferred to another owner. They do not need the loan to finish the project. They want you to sign a deal that will leave them with real control of the company.”

Then I understood why Alejandro was not trying to hide his attempt to bring me back. He needed not a wife, but a signatory.

Sandro lowered his voice.

“But that is not all. After this recording, someone sent another file. It will arrive tomorrow morning.”

“Who sent it?”

Sandro looked at his phone. An unknown number was blinking on the screen.

“A message has just arrived. It says that if you do not open this file at nine tomorrow morning, Alejandro will be arrested not for financial fraud, but for the matter about which none of us knows anything…”

“For what matter?” I asked.

Sandro did not have time to answer. The phone rang again. This time the number of a private clinic appeared on the screen. My father answered the call and silently listened to several words. His face gradually hardened.

“We are going to the clinic,” he said.

“Now?”

“The file is there.”

It was ten at night when we stopped in the underground parking lot of a clinic on the other side of the city. The smell of chlorine and metal stood in the basement. White lights flickered periodically, and our shadows broke apart on the floor.

The clinic administrator, a woman around fifty, was waiting for us by the elevator. She held a small dark folder.

“Are you Valeria Mendoza?” she asked me.

“Yes.”

“This was delivered personally to you. I was asked to open it only together with your father.”

I took the folder. It had neither a name nor a stamp on it. Only the small moon was drawn there, the one I now encountered almost everywhere.

My father placed his hand on my wrist.

“Are you ready?”

“No. But I am still going to open it.”

Sandro spread the folder open on the table. Inside lay one document, two medical photographs, and a sealed envelope. The document stated that six years earlier, several months after my marriage, Beatriz de la Vega had undergone an examination at the clinic under the name of an anonymous patient.

The patient was Alejandro.

“Why did he come here?” I asked.

The administrator lowered her eyes.

“At that time he needed urgent treatment. The doctor discovered that he needed an organ transplant. The records say that the family decided to search for a donor independently and did not submit the matter to the state.”

Sandro opened the sealed envelope.

“Here is the genetic conclusion.”

I took the sheet in my hand. I read the first line, but could not understand it. I looked at it a second time.

The donor was me.

Six years earlier, still newly married, I had signed papers that I thought concerned Alejandro’s general medical examination. Beatriz told me that helping my husband was my marital duty. But they used a sample of my organ to secretly establish that I was a compatible donor.

But the operation had not taken place.

At the bottom of the document it said that Beatriz had attempted to illegally alter the donor’s consent and had submitted my medical data to an insurance company to cover the family’s debt.

“This is impossible,” I whispered.

“Unfortunately, it is possible,” the administrator said. “Your signature at that time did not confirm consent to organ donation, but someone altered the document. We later discovered that the record had been interfered with.”

My father leaned on the table.

“Why did you not notify us?”

“We sent a notification to the old address. Then the file disappeared.”

Sandro raised the second sheet.

“This signature is forged. Here is the expert examination. There are twenty-nine differences between Valeria’s real signature and this document.”

Cold spread through my body. I was not merely a deceived wife. They had even considered my body the property of their family.

At that very moment, the administrator’s phone rang.

“Yes?” she answered.

Within several seconds, the color drained from her face.

“The police are coming to the clinic. Someone informed them that Valeria is here and allegedly stole a medical file.”

Sandro clenched his teeth.

“Alejandro did this. He is trying to make us take the blame for the evidence.”

My father looked toward me.

“We have two choices now: run and allow them to say we stole the file, or stay and reveal everything in front of the cameras.”

I looked at the camera hanging at the end of the corridor. Then I looked at the document bearing my forged signature.

“Let’s stay.”

“Valeria…” Sandro began.

“This time no one will hide the truth in my name.”

The elevator doors opened. Two police officers came out. Behind them stood Alejandro, with false calm of victory in his eyes.

“Valeria,” he said, “you have one last chance. Sign the agreement and I will forget everything.”

Sandro turned on the recording. Alejandro’s own voice rang through the corridor: “If we obtain her signature, all the financing will come under our control.”

The color disappeared from Alejandro’s face.

But at that moment a new message arrived on my father’s phone. He read it and turned toward me.

“Valeria, bad news. Beatriz has already filed a lawsuit in court this morning. She claims that you deceived her family for years and that the company shares belong to you not legally, but through fraud.”

Alejandro smiled.

“Now you will see how real power works.”

But he did not yet know that together with the statement filed in court, Beatriz had left behind, with her own hand, evidence that would turn everyone against her…