From Substitute Wife to the CEO's Obsession novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: The Price of the Loan
At lunch in Tlaquepaque, Lorena's mother shows a release to sign the day Renata wakes and calls her the collateral for her father's loan; Lorena refuses and Ignacio walks in and takes her away. In the car he asks her to read to her sister tomorrow.
The Mendiola house stood on a hill in Tlaquepaque, behind a gate the guards opened without looking up.
Lorena had grown up in that house and had never once felt it was hers.
Renata's portrait still hung in the entrance hall, three times the size of the one beside it.
The one beside it was Lorena at sixteen, smiling in a school uniform, half hidden behind a plant.
"Your mother is in the dining room," the housekeeper said quietly. "She started without you."
Her mother sat at the head of the table with a glass of wine and a folder at her elbow.
Her father sat at the far end and cut his chicken into very small pieces.
"You're late," her mother said.
"I'm six minutes early."
"Sit. Did you bring it?"
Lorena put the contract on the table and sat down.
Her mother did not look at it.
"Your sister's fingers moved yesterday," she said. "The doctors say she could be awake in weeks."
"I know. I'm glad."
"Then you understand what happens next."
Lorena picked up her water.
"Tell me what you think happens next."
"Ignacio goes back to the woman he loves. That was always the arrangement."
Her mother slid the folder across the tablecloth.
"Consuelo's lawyer drew this up. When Renata opens her eyes, you sign it the same day. You leave the house, you take your clothes, and you take nothing else."
Lorena opened the folder and read the first page.
She read the second page.
"This says I give up the allowance, the house, and any claim to the Barrera name," she said.
"You never touched the allowance."
"That isn't the point."
"The point," her mother said, "is the loan. Your father's company owes the Barrera Group eleven million pesos. Ignacio stretched it for a year the week you married him. If you sign quietly, he forgets it. If you make a fuss, he doesn't."
Her father's knife stopped moving.
"So I was the collateral," Lorena said.
"You were a daughter doing her duty. Your sister would have done the same."
"Renata would have been asked politely."
Her mother set her glass down hard.
"Do not take that tone about your sister. She is the one lying in a bed."
Lorena closed the folder and slid it back across the table.
"I'm not signing this today."
"You will sign it."
"I will end it myself, when I decide to, with my own pen."
"You will do exactly what you are told, the way you have always done."
Her mother half rose from her chair, one hand lifted.
"Enough," her father said.
It was the first word he had spoken since Lorena sat down.
Her mother turned on him, then sat back slowly.
"Then you explain it to her," she said. "You explain what the bank will do to us."
Her father looked at his plate.
He said nothing more.
That was when the front door opened.
Footsteps crossed the hall, unhurried, and the dining room doors swung wide.
Ignacio stood in the doorway in his work suit, his tie pulled loose and his hair out of place.
Lorena had not seen him look hurried in a year.
"Ignacio," her mother said, and her voice turned sweet in half a second. "What a lovely surprise. Sit, we were only talking."
"I heard you," he said.
He did not look at her mother.
He looked at the folder, then at the red mark on Lorena's wrist where she had been gripping the chair.
"Consuelo's lawyer did not tell me about that paper," he said.
"It is a family matter," her mother said.
"My wife is my family."
Lorena looked down at the tablecloth.
He was protecting the Barrera name, she told herself, the way he always did.
"Lorena," he said. "We're leaving."
"I haven't finished my lunch," she said, though she had not touched it.
"Then we'll eat somewhere else."
She picked up her bag and left the contract on the table.
Then she turned back, took it again and put it in her bag.
Nobody stopped her.
In the car Ignacio sat on the far side of the back seat and watched the road.
The driver took the long way down the hill.
"Eat something," Ignacio said after a few minutes. "There's a bag on the floor."
She looked down.
It held two warm pastries from the bakery near the hospital, the kind she liked.
She had told him she liked them once, in the first week of the marriage.
She did not know he had been listening.
She held the bag in her lap and did not open it.
"Thank you for coming," she said. "You didn't have to protect the Barrera name."
His jaw tightened.
"Come to the hospital tomorrow at ten," he said. "The doctor says Renata may respond to familiar voices."
"Yours?" she asked.
"Yours."
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