My mother-in-law tore my dress in half in my own kitchen in front of twenty people and shouted that her son had paid for everything in it. Then I put my phone down on the counter and let it run.

Marco settled. He is repaying a figure I am not going to publish, out of a salary from somewhere else, and he will be paying it until he is about fifty-eight.

I did not report him to the prosecutors. My board wanted me to and I overruled them, which cost me something with two of them that I have not got back.

The reason is not affection.

It is that Marco Ibarra was thirty-eight when his uncle put that first contract in front of him, and he has never in his life made a decision his mother had not already made, and I do not think the state fixes that.

We divorced in the spring.

He sees nobody from that side of the family now except his mother, which tells you which way that went.

Delfina has told the parish that I threw her out of her son’s house and changed the locks out of pride.

She is not entirely wrong about the locks.

Give me that. My son paid for every thread in this house.

She said that holding a dress I had bought on a Thursday, in a kitchen in a house I bought in 2014, in front of twenty-five people who had eaten at my table for nine years.