The first project was undoing everything Valerie had done in my bedroom.
“We’re going to give this room its soul back, Mom,” Lucy said on Tuesday morning.
We went down to the garage and started bringing my furniture up. My mother’s dresser—heavy dark wood with hand carvings. Lucy got help from two neighborhood boys to bring up my bed. When they assembled it in its original spot, I sat on the mattress and something inside me settled.
“It doesn’t smell like her perfume anymore,” I said.
“We kept the windows open all week,” Lucy said. “The smell left. And so did she.”
Lucy hung my photographs back on the walls. “Look, Mom. Here are you and Dad on your wedding day. So young.”
The photo looked at me from its frame, the glass now repaired. Lewis in his brown suit, me in my simple white dress. We had our whole lives ahead of us. We didn’t know his would be so short and mine so difficult.
“I miss him,” I whispered. “Especially now. He would know what to do about Robert.”
“I think he would have done exactly what you did,” Lucy said. “Dad was gentle, but he wasn’t a fool. He didn’t tolerate betrayal.”
We spent two full days restoring my room. We painted the walls peach again. Lucy found the exact shade of paint I had used years ago online. We put up my floral curtains, my knitted blankets, my family photos.
When we finished, I stood in the center of my room and turned slowly, looking at every corner.
“There,” I said. “I’m home again.”
But while I was reclaiming my space, Robert and Valerie were discovering the consequences of their actions.
Lucy kept in touch with some people in the neighborhood, and the news came in whispers through gossipy neighbors who came to see how I was, but who really wanted to share what they knew.
Mrs. Lupita, the lady from the corner store, was the first to visit.
“Oh, Emily, what a terrible thing about your son,” she said while drinking the coffee I offered her. “I saw him the other day carrying boxes into an apartment building in the industrial park. Tiny little apartments, the kind that rent for $950 a month.”
“$950,” I repeated softly. Almost all of Robert’s salary would go to rent.
“And how did he look?” I asked, unable to stop myself. He was my son after all.
“Worn out, honey,” Mrs. Lupita said. “Dark circles down to the floor.”
She sighed and leaned closer. “And Valerie—oh, she was in a foul mood, yelling at the moving guys, complaining about everything.”
A week later, I ran into Mr. Martin, the owner of the hardware store where Robert used to buy things.
“Mrs. Fuentes, your son came in the other day asking for a loan,” he told me while I was buying new pots for my garden. “I told him I couldn’t help him, but he looked desperate. Said collectors were looking for him. That the loan shark he owes is sending people to his job.”
The loan shark. The $25,000 loan without the house as collateral.
How was Robert going to pay?
Lucy did her own research and told me what she found out.
“Robert is trying to renegotiate the debt,” she told me one night at dinner. “But the loan shark won’t budge. He’s charging him interest on top of interest. The debt has already grown to $32,000.”
“And with no assets to offer, he can’t get another loan to pay this one.”
She picked at her food without appetite. “And at his job, that’s another problem. One of the collectors went to his office, made a scene at the reception. Robert’s boss found out about the debts and the fraud. They didn’t fire him, but they demoted him. He’s no longer a supervising engineer. Now he’s an assistant. They cut his salary almost in half.”
I put my hand to my chest. As much as Robert had hurt me, he was still my son, and hearing how his life was falling apart pained me in complicated ways.
“And Valerie,” Lucy added, and she almost smiled, but it was a sad smile, “she’s the one really suffering. She had to get a job for the first time in years. I saw her at the supermarket two days ago. She was filling out a job application to be a cashier.”
The image of Valerie—always so put together, so smug—working as a cashier was hard to imagine.
Two weeks after the eviction, I received a call. It was an unknown number. I hesitated before answering.
“Hello, Emily. It’s Claudia.”
Valerie’s mom. Claudia—the one who told her daughter she was smart for trying to steal my house.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“I need to talk to you,” she said. Her voice sounded tired. “Can we meet?”
“I have nothing to talk to you about.”
“Please,” she insisted. “Just half an hour. I promise it’ll be worth your while.”
Something in her tone made me agree.
We arranged to meet at a coffee shop near my house the next day.
Claudia arrived on time. She was a woman my age, well-dressed, but her face was marked with exhaustion. She sat across from me and ordered a black coffee.
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