PART 1

“Your wife died during childbirth… and the baby didn’t survive either.”

Those were the first words my mother said when I stepped into my home, holding a bouquet of white lilies for my wife.

For three weeks, I had been in Monterrey closing a deal to save our family vineyards. Every night, I imagined coming home to Camila. I imagined her smile, her hands resting on her round belly, her laughing as she told me our son had kicked again.

But when I entered our house in San Miguel de Allende, there was no laughter.

There was only a coffin in the middle of the living room.

Black curtains covered the windows. Candles burned around the room like someone had carefully arranged a tragedy. The air smelled of wax, dead flowers, and something I could not yet name.

My mother, Teresa Armenta, stood by the fireplace in a perfect black dress, her hair pinned neatly, her lips painted a red too bright for mourning. She was not crying. She was not even pretending to.

“Where is Camila?” I asked, even though the coffin had already answered.

Teresa tilted her head toward it.

“There, son. Be strong.”

The lilies slipped from my hand and fell across the floor.

I walked to the coffin as if the room had gone silent around me. Camila lay inside, pale and beautiful, her hair arranged neatly on a white pillow. She looked almost asleep.

But something was wrong.

Camila hated the way people folded the dead like saints.

“When I die,” she once told me, “don’t make me look like a statue. I was a woman, not a decoration.”

And yet, one of her hands had been placed across her chest.

The other was clenched tightly shut.

Too tightly.

I bent closer and reached for it.

“Don’t disturb her,” my mother said.

It was not a request.

It was an order.

I looked at her across the coffin.

“She is my wife.”

“There is nothing you can do for her now, Julian.”

Her coldness cut through my grief and left something sharper behind. My mother had always thought I was weak. She said I felt too much, that my brother Rodrigo had the kind of strength needed to lead a family like ours.

Camila had always said my calm was not weakness.

It was my shield.

Carefully, I opened my wife’s stiff fingers one by one.