They Separated Me from My Little Sister. When I Looked Back, All I Had Was an Old Rusted Warehouse My Grandfather Had Left Me.

So we just looked at each other. And that pane of glass became an entire country between us.

My black bag was light: two pairs of pants, three T-shirts, a thin jacket, a storybook my mom used to read to me when life still had Sundays, and a photo of the four of us at a fair—Dad holding me, Mom laughing, Mariana with cotton candy… and my grandfather in the back, as if he didn’t want to be in the picture but was actually watching over everything.

I walked without turning around because if I did, I’d freeze there until the ground swallowed me.

The bus terminal smelled like reheated coffee and disinfectant. I sat on a plastic bench and opened the envelope. There was a letter from Notary Anselmo Figueroa in a small mountain town in Hidalgo whose name I could barely pronounce.

The legal language boiled down to this:

My grandfather had left me a plot of land. No utilities. Almost one hectare. “Lot 7-B.” No formal access road. To take possession, I had to appear in person… and pay the overdue property tax and transfer fees.

Total: one hundred pesos.

One hundred pesos for land.

I laughed under my breath. One hundred pesos was a couple of sandwiches and a soda. It had to be a trap. A joke.