PART 1
“So for you, my daughter does not matter the same as my brother’s children?”
The question came out of my mouth with a calmness I did not even understand myself, but inside I already felt that something was breaking forever.
My name is Sara Lozano, I am 27 years old, and I live in Querétaro with my husband Marcos and our daughter Lía, who was about to turn 5. For almost three years, every Friday at 9 in the morning, I made exactly the same transfer: 550 dollars converted into pesos to my parents’ account, Margarita and Roberto Lozano. I never missed once. Sometimes the money went out before I bought groceries. Sometimes before paying the rent. Sometimes before deciding whether that month we could buy Lía new shoes or make do a little longer with the ones that were already too tight.
I kept telling myself it was temporary. That a good daughter helped. That if my parents were in trouble, I could not look the other way. Years earlier, my mother had cried to me on the phone, saying the mortgage was suffocating them, that my father’s hours at the hardware store had been cut, that they were at risk of losing the house. I did not ask too many questions. I just helped. At first it was less. Then, little by little, the amount rose until those 550 a week became part of our own suffocation.
