Chapter 2 - The Red Folder
The airport in Puerto Vallarta was too bright, too loud, too slow. Every line felt endless. Every announcement echoed like it was mocking us. Mateo stood at the counter arguing quietly with an agent about changing our flight, his jaw tight, his knuckles pale against the strap of his bag.
"The earliest flight is in four hours," he told me when he came back. "There's nothing sooner."
Four hours. Four hours of not knowing what was happening in our house, four hours of imagining Nora and Armando going through drawers, opening boxes, reading things that were none of their business.
I called the house line, hoping maybe the landline extension on the security system would let me talk directly through the speaker.
Nora answered on the second ring, as if she had been waiting.
"Valeria," she said warmly, like nothing at all was wrong. "Have you eaten? You should eat something. Travel is hard on an empty stomach."
"Nora, what's in the folder?"
There was a pause, the kind that told me she was smiling on the other end.
"You'll see when you get here," she said. "I think it's better this way. Face to face. Family things should be discussed as family."
"We are not discussing anything," I said. "You broke into our house."
"I let myself in," she corrected gently, as if the distinction mattered. "There's a difference, mija."
I hated that she called me that. Mija. Like I was still someone she loved, instead of someone she had just tried to steamroll out of her own home.
"Put Mateo's father's name on that folder or not," I said, "it doesn't give you the right to move suitcases into our guest room."
Her voice sharpened just slightly. "You don't know everything about this family, Valeria. You've been married to my son for three years. Three years does not make you an expert on forty years of history."
"It makes me the person who owns this house," I said, and hung up before she could answer.
Mateo was watching me with an expression I couldn't quite place. Not anger. Something closer to dread.
"She's talking about my father," he said quietly, once we were seated at the gate.
"What about your father?"
Mateo rubbed his hands over his face. "When he died, there was a life insurance policy. My mom always said it wasn't much, that most of it went to funeral costs and old debts. But there was a year, right before she married Armando, when she kept asking me strange questions. About the house. About whether I'd ever add her name to anything."
My stomach dropped. "Did you?"
"No," he said immediately. "Never. I told her clearly — this house is yours and mine. Not my mother's, not my mother's husband's."
"Then what's in the folder, Mateo?"
He looked at me, and for the first time since we'd left the resort, I saw real fear in his eyes.
"I don't know," he admitted. "But she wouldn't have made a scene like that over nothing. My mother doesn't do anything without a plan."
The gate agent called our boarding group. We stood, gathered our bags, and joined the slow line toward the plane, neither of us speaking. I kept picturing that red folder sitting on our kitchen counter, innocent and rectangular, holding whatever weapon Nora believed would win her the war she'd apparently been planning for months.
On the plane, I tried to distract myself by checking the camera app one more time before we lost signal. The living room was empty now — no Nora, no Armando, no suitcases in sight. For a moment I let myself hope they'd left.
Then the feed shifted. Someone had moved a second camera we kept in the hallway, angling it toward the guest room door, which was now closed. A folded blanket sat outside it, and a pair of Armando's shoes had been placed neatly by the wall, like he intended to stay a very long time.
I showed Mateo the screen just as the flight attendant asked us to switch to airplane mode.
"They're settling in," I said. "Like we already lost."
Mateo's hand found mine and gripped it hard.
"We haven't lost anything," he said. "We just don't know what she's holding yet. That's all. Once we know, we fight it properly."
I wanted to believe him. But three hours in the air felt like a lifetime, trapped with nothing to do but imagine every terrible possibility — forged documents, old promises, some clause buried in his father's will that Nora had kept hidden for years, waiting for the exact right moment to use it against us.
When we finally landed and turned our phones back on, there was a single text waiting from Nora.
Don't rush. The folder isn't going anywhere. Neither am I.
May you like
I stared at those words the whole ride home, my hands cold despite the warm night air pouring through the taxi window, wondering exactly what kind of fight we were about to walk into.
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