“I clean houses five days a week, sometimes six if I need extra cash.”
My voice sounded tired, even to my own ears.
Rey nodded slowly.
“My mother cleaned houses, too. She worked until the cancer left her so weak she couldn’t even hold a broom. She died with shattered hands and a broken back. She was forty-eight years old.”
The pain in his voice was so raw that it hurt my chest.
“My mother died at fifty-two. Diabetes. She didn’t have money for medicine. She kept working until she collapsed at one of her client’s houses. The owner didn’t even call an ambulance. She just called me to come pick her up because she was dirtying her marble floor.”
The words came out bitter, loaded with a rage I had kept for fourteen years. Rey hit the steering wheel with the palm of his hand—not hard, but with impotent frustration.
“Our mothers killed themselves working while our father accumulated properties. He could have helped them. He could have given us better lives. But he chose secrecy and control above everything else.”
He rubbed his eyes with one hand as if trying to erase painful images.
“That’s why I want to use that money to help other women—so that no other mother has to die cleaning the floors of people who don’t even see her as human.”
“What do you do for work?” I asked, needing to shift the weight of the conversation a little.
Rey smiled sadly.
“I’m a mechanic. I have a small shop on the south side. I fix old cars—the ones people with money no longer want. I don’t earn much, but it’s honest. Every cent that comes into my pocket I earned with my own hands, not by stealing from anyone or lying to anyone.”
There was pride in his voice. A genuine pride that my son never had.
Michael.
The thought of him pierced me like a knife. My son. The child I raised, who I fed with food I didn’t eat so he wouldn’t go hungry. The child I walked to school every day for twelve years, walking in the sun and rain because we didn’t have money for the bus. The child who cried in my arms when he had his first heartbreak, when he failed a test, when he felt rejected by the world. That child had become a cruel stranger who used me as a disposable tool.
“Do you think he will come back?”
The question came out before I could stop it. Rey didn’t answer immediately. He kept driving, his hands firm on the steering wheel, his gaze fixed on the road.
“Honestly, I don’t know. Greed does strange things to people. He might accept that he lost and disappear. Or he might try something desperate.”
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye.
“That’s why I want you to have this.”
He took something from the compartment between the seats and handed it to me. It was a card with his phone number handwritten on it.
“If Michael tries to contact you, if he threatens you, if you feel you are in danger, you call me immediately. No matter the time, no matter the day, you call me and I will go.”
The seriousness in his voice left no room for doubt. This man who had only known me for a few hours was willing to protect me, while my son who had shared my life for thirty-eight years had planned my destruction.
I put the card in my purse along with the documents from the warehouse.
“Rey, there’s something I don’t understand.”
He looked at me briefly before returning his gaze to the road.
“Why did our father write that will that way—with that clause about heirs trying to deceive others? If he spent his whole life lying and manipulating, why put a moral rule in his will?”
Rey exhaled slowly.
“I’ve thought a lot about that. I think in the end, when he knew he was dying, he had a moment of clarity—or maybe cowardice. He didn’t have the courage to tell us the truth in life, but he wanted to make sure that after his death, none of his children would destroy each other for his dirty money. It was his twisted way of protecting us, not from ourselves, but from each other.”
“One last manipulation,” I said bitterly. “Even from the grave, he kept controlling.”
Rey nodded.
“But this time his manipulation protected us. Without that clause, your son would have won. He would have destroyed you legally and kept everything. Our father, for the first time in his selfish life, did something that benefited us—even if it was by accident.”
We arrived at my building twenty minutes later. It was a gray concrete block of five stories with small balconies full of hanging laundry and pots with half-dead plants. It wasn’t pretty, but it was home. Rey turned off the engine and turned to me.
“Will you be okay tonight?”
The question was loaded with genuine concern. I nodded, although I wasn’t sure if it was true.
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