Chapter 2 - THE PAPERWORK IN THE TRASH
The silence in the grand library was so thick you could hear the soft tick of the antique grandfather clock in the corner.
Don Alejandro held the university document between two fingers as if it were made of thin glass. Mrs. Beatriz stared at her husband, then snatched the paper out of his hand.
"What is this nonsense?" she spat out, scanning the text. "A fake diploma? Is this part of your scam, girl?"
"It’s not fake, Mom," Mateo said, his chest rising and falling heavily. "She never told me about it. I didn't even know."
I stepped forward, my voice remaining calm despite the adrenaline racing through my veins. "I accepted the medical school scholarship three years ago, Mrs. Beatriz. I completed two years of pre-med coursework at the top of my class."
"Then why are you scrubbing my toilets?!" Mrs. Beatriz sneered, crumbling the corner of the paper slightly.
"Because my father was a regional manager for a logistics company," I answered, looking her straight in the eyes. "When his business partner fled the country after committing fraud, my father was left with three million pesos in debt. He had a heart attack two months later. I dropped out of medical school and took two jobs to keep the debt collectors from taking my mother's home."
Don Alejandro looked down at my spilled bag on the floor. Beside my cracked phone lay three advanced organic chemistry textbooks and a stack of color-coded index cards.
"You're paying off your late father's corporate debt..." Don Alejandro murmured, a flicker of genuine respect appearing in his dark eyes.
"Don't fall for it, Alejandro!" Mrs. Beatriz hissed, tossing the university paper back onto the table. "She’s clever, I’ll give her that. She used her little academic tricks to get close to our son, knowing that if she made herself indispensable, Mateo would fall for her. It’s a classic gold-digger strategy!"
"I never asked Mateo for a single cent," I said firmly. "I worked my assigned hours. I helped him after my shifts were over because I saw a boy who was destroying his life simply because no one had the patience to explain things to him."
"That's enough!" Rogelio’s cold voice cut through from the hallway. He had walked in, his hands casually shoved into the pockets of his tailored suit pants. "Alejandro, Beatriz is right. We cannot have a domestic worker exerting this kind of psychological influence over the heir to Grupo Salcedo. It looks terrible for the family brand. If the board hears that Mateo is being tutored by the maid, our stock valuation takes a hit before the upcoming merger."
Rogelio looked at me with pure disdain. "Pack your bags, Valeria. You are terminated effective immediately. No severance."
"You can't fire her!" Mateo yelled, stepping toward his uncle. "I hired her to tutor me!"
"You don't hire anyone in this house, Mateo," Mrs. Beatriz said, her voice dripping with ice. "I do."
She grabbed my uniform from the laundry hook in the hall, shoved it into that black trash bag, and brought it to the foyer where the dinner party was already underway. She wanted maximum public humiliation. She wanted to ensure I would never dare set foot in San Pedro again.
As I stood in the foyer, watching Forty wealthy guests avert their eyes, Don Alejandro walked up to me while his wife was busy boasting to her friends about "cleaning house."
He reached into his breast pocket and handed me a thick white envelope.
"This is your final pay, plus an additional amount for the tutoring hours Mateo mentioned," Don Alejandro said softly, ensuring his wife couldn't hear. "I am sorry for how my wife handled this, Valeria. You are clearly a very intelligent young woman. But for Mateo's sake and the family name... it is better if you leave."
I took the envelope, kept my head held high, and walked out the heavy iron gates of the Salcedo estate into the cold night rain.
I didn't cry until I reached the bus stop three miles down the hill. But as I wiped the rainwater from my face, my phone vibrated in my pocket.
It was a text message from an unknown number:
May you like
They think they won, Valeria. But I saved all the math notebooks you wrote in. I'm taking the final entrance exams for the National Engineering Institute next month. I'm going to prove to them that everything you taught me was real.
— Mateo.
