01/12 Chapter 477 I'm loving every step I take
Today was the inauguration of my apartment’s shared and outdoor spaces. Since my parents were at the beach house, I invited your dad and my sister. She was really excited, but she left work early and the event wouldn’t start until 6:30 p.m. With time to kill, she picked up Rafinha and went home instead. I didn’t mind much. I imagined it would be something simple—just a quick walk through the downstairs areas of the building, the pool, the gym, nothing more than that.
I picked you up from school, and then it was just the three of us—you, your dad, and me. But the moment we arrived, everything changed. There was complimentary valet parking. At the entrance, they handed us VIP wristbands. There were drinks, appetizers, champagne, even live music. It was a beautiful event, the kind you don’t expect. For a moment, I even felt rich. I’m not used to this kind of thing at all.
Before we even went in, the receptionist asked if I was there to pick up the keys. I was caught off guar, I hadn’t realized they were already handing them out. I told her I had no idea, and she suggested I check with someone from the staff inside the event. I did, and that’s when they explained: keys are only released once the apartment is fully paid off. Until then, it technically still belongs to the construction company.
I tried to ask gently if I could at least go up with someone from the company just to take measurements for the custom furniture. They said no. I won’t lie, it stung a little to watch some people receiving their keys while I remained on standby. But I can’t be ungrateful. Ungratefulness is one of the ugliest traits there is. If my dad can only pay the final amount in February, then so be it. We’ll wait a little longer. Rushing has never been a friend of perfection. After everything my father has done, all I can feel is gratitude.
We went on to explore the outdoor and shared areas, and everything was beautiful. The place is so large it almost feels like a shopping mall. People looked refined, elegant... I noticed expensive designer bags everywhere. The pool was stunning, truly resort-like. I found the party room a bit small, but the kids’ playroom completely stole my heart. And yours too. You didn’t want to leave.
The only sour note was your dad. He seemed moody, distant. He didn’t congratulate me, didn’t hug , nothing. That hurt more than I expected. While texting my sister, I mentioned the event, the fancy food and drinks, and she immediately got excited. She said she’d come with Rafael and Rafinha, even if it took a bit longer. When your dad overheard the call, he clearly didn’t like that I’d invited her. I got nervous, and we ended up arguing. I told him I just wanted someone there who felt genuinely happy for me—for my achievement—someone who would celebrate me, maybe even hug me. Something he hadn’t done.
It’s a very luxurious apartment. An apartment worth over R$1.7 million. I know a big part of that came from my father’s help, and without him, I would never have achieved this. But a large part of it is mine too, earned through my work, my effort, my persistence. I work hard, and I work with purpose. It’s all for moments like this. Lost in those thoughts, I went back to the garage where the food and drinks were being served and picked up a glass of champagne. I’m not much of a drinker, but it felt like the right moment to celebrate—with myself.
Still, the feeling was bittersweet. At the same time that I felt happy, empowered, independent, it hurt to see everyone else celebrating their milestones with a partner, or surrounded by a whole family. I knew it would be just you and me. Not a complete family. And that made me feel like I had failed you somehowfailed to give you that. The feeling is awful.
And yet, there’s also pride. Pride in knowing I did this without a partner. Pride in knowing my character, in knowing I am not—and will never be—a woman who depends on someone else for her worth. But there’s another side to that independence too. A lonely side. Living life without someone who truly calls you theirs. Especially when I was someone who always dreamed of getting married, who believed deeply in love, who wanted to live it fully and intensely.
Today, I think about that much less. But every now and then, in moments like this, my former self insists on showing up.
I even felt my eyes well up for a moment, but then my sister arrived and the atmosphere softened. She may have every flaw in the world, but when she’s in a good mood, she has this gift of lighting up any room she walks into—and that’s exactly what she did. I asked your dad to bring you down to the garage, and you were so, so happy to see Rafinha. Even your dad, who hadn’t loved the idea of them coming at first, ended up enjoying himself once they arrived.
Meanwhile, the champagne was starting to hit me, and I kept refilling my glass.
My sister was genuinely happy for me, and they all congratulated me. And of course, the very first thing you did was grab Rafinha by the hand and take him straight to the playroom. You two had the best time together. The outdoor playground, I thought, was much simpler than the rest of the building, but you barely noticed. You stayed in the playroom the whole time—and when it was finally time to leave, there were tears, protests, and a whole lot of crying.
06/12 Chapter 478 This is just the start
Today I announced the store’s opening to my clients. Some said they wanted to come but worked during the week, so I decided to try a Saturday and see how it would go—whether there would be movement, whether people would actually show up. I asked my grandmother to bake a chocolate cake, and I took it to the store with me.
About five of my clients came. That made me happy, even though I had hoped for more people. A couple of friends—clients too—showed up and didn’t buy anything, and I guess it’s normal to feel a little disappointed about that. Still, by the end of the day, we had sold a little over four hundred reais, which felt like a win. Even keeping only half—since Rosely and I split everything equally—it was the best sales day we’ve had so far.
I know, though, that many people who come to “support” you don’t always come back. They show up once, do their part, and move on. The real problem with the store is its location. It’s on an avenue where cars pass constantly, but hardly any people walk by. Unlike other shopping streets, foot traffic here is almost nonexistent, so very few people come in spontaneously. Our success will only come when we build loyal customers and grow through word of mouth. Still, I believe it can happen—slowly, step by step—and maybe, someday, it could become something much bigger.
Before we closed for the day, your dad stopped by with you. You finally got to see my little space, and, of course, you ate plenty of chocolate cake.
08/12 Chapter 479 The First Broken Hearts
Lately, you’ve been having quite a few nightmares at night. You wake up crying at least twice every night. Some of the phrases I’ve heard you say in your sleep stay with me:
“Rafa, it’s mine! Give it back!”
“Grandpa, grandpa!”
“I don’t want to!”
Every now and then, though, I catch you laughing in your dreams. Just once or twice. And that somehow makes everything feel softer.
If I could take your nightmares away, I would. Without thinking twice. But nightmares are something we all have, something that only ends when we open our eyes. And sometimes, even after we wake up and fall back asleep, the dream keeps going. That part still has no explanation for me.
When you cry, I usually go to your bed. I hug you, give you kisses, fix your little body until it settles again. Sometimes I fall asleep right there with you, and when I wake up later, I quietly return to my own bed. Lately, in the mornings, you’ve been waking up and coming to sleep in my bed instead. It’s early, the daylight is already there, so I let you. And when you finally wake up for real, you lift my shirt or pajamas and kiss my scar. The sweetest thing. You are the sweetest thing.
Watching you do that always takes me back to myself.
I used to sleep in my own room, in my own bed. But sometime in the middle of the night or very early at dawn my body worked like a biological clock. I’d wake up and go sleep on the couch. Every single morning, when my parents woke up, they’d find me there. Don’t ask me why. I never knew. I just did it, and I liked it. Especially when we had that black leather couch—it was cold, and I loved it. I think I only stopped around twelve or thirteen. It happened every night, until one day it simply didn’t anymore.
And now, I need to tell you an important milestone: you gave up the bottle.
I was so happy. And it was easier than I ever imagined. I sat with you and explained that just like you stopped using a pacifier because it was for babies, the bottle was the same. I told you that Santa usually brings gifts to children, not babies—babies are too little to understand, and babies drink from bottles. I took advantage of the Christmas mood. Then I grabbed your mermaid cup—you’ve been obsessed with mermaids lately—added a straw, and voilà. You drank from it without much trouble. We repeated it over the next few days, and it worked beautifully. Goodbye bottle. Pacifier and bottle: both gone, smoothly and successfully.
With me, though, it was a very different story.
I remember suffering quite a bit. I was deeply attached to both my pacifier and my bottle. The pacifier came first, when I was younger. I only used that one specific one. One day, in Caraguatatuba, it got lost and no one could find it. Hours later, my parents actually did, but they decided to stick with the lie, since the seed had already been planted in my head. I cried for a few days, then eventually forgot. But I remember how much I suffered.
The bottle came later. I was older, maybe six, seven, eight years old. I remember it clearly. It was green, with little horses on a carousel. I loved that bottle. One day, my parents probably realized it was madness for a child my age to still have one. My dad had a pickup truck back then, and on our way somewhere he said the bottle had fallen off the truck. I don’t remember which loss hurt more. I just know both of them did.
Bottles and pacifiers are comfort for children. They make them feel safe, held, secure. In a way, they’re the first things children are asked to let go of. The first lessons in loss. The first goodbyes. Maybe, for many of them, the first broken heart.
With you, thank God, it was easy. The pacifier only became easy because of the surgery you had, but I was still afraid you’d suffer. There’s one thing I find truly hard to see—a big child with a pacifier in their mouth. I hate it. But only parents know how painful it is to take it away, to decide when the time is right. It’s complicated.
Still, I’m so proud of you, my little one.
You keep surprising me.
13/12 Chapter 482 A girl can dream
This week there was a holiday program at your preschool, and the daily fee was R$78. Your dad and I split it evenly, each of us covering one day.
Every day brought a different activity: painting, playing with modeling clay, making Christmas crafts, and even a water-play day, which I’m pretty sure was your favorite. You already love school during the regular year, but the holiday program is even better: less routine, more mess, more laughter, more play.
On Friday, you and your cousin skipped school because you went to the beach. You were supposed to leave around 2:30 p.m., but as always, my parents ran late, and you only left São Paulo at 6:30 p.m., the worst possible time, on a Friday, no less. Rush hour traffic. Endless traffic. You arrived very late.
My mom said that even so, you stayed up for quite a while and told her you were hungry. You ended up eating chicken after midnight.
That night was my first alone in a long time, and even then, I already missed you. Tomorrow, though, your dad and I will meet you there, and with a bit of luck, we’ll have three light, happy days — days filled with fun and the kind of moments that quietly turn into memories.
I hope your dad shows up in a good mood this time. I hope everyone respects each other’s limits. It would be nice if your dad could be a little more understanding of my parents’ way of being, and if my parents could be a little more understanding of him. Maybe this time, everyone will meet each other halfway.
A girl can dream, right?
16/12 Chapter 483 What We Call Nonsense
Today was complicated.
Do you remember Joaquim’s birthday party — Lucas’s son — the one we went to when I still had stitches in my belly? The one where I took you and your cousin and nearly lost my mind over Rafinha? That one.
At that party, I was surprised to see the entire extended family there, except for mine. At Joaquim’s previous birthday, only adults with children had been invited. There had been a clear logic, a kind of unspoken rule. But this time, it wasn’t just adults with kids. Everyone I know as family was there.
Everyone but us.
I tried not to dwell on it. Still, some details lingered. Lucas has four uncles. One of them is my maternal grandfather. And among all of them, he was the only one not invited.
Now, next week, my grandparents will celebrate sixty years of marriage — their diamond anniversary. The whole family is being invited, and at first my grandfather didn’t really want to invite Lucas, his wife, and their children. Not out of spite exactly, but because of that last party — the one he hadn’t been invited to.
In the end, my aunt and my grandmother convinced him to let it go. To rise above it. So they sent Lucas the invitation. From what I know, he saw the message and didn’t respond.
And up to that point, it was fine.
The problem is that a few days later, I received the invitation to the birthday party of his second child — the youngest — at the same kids buffet, celebrating his second birthday. The very next day, I asked my mom whether she had been invited. She said no, but told me she would check if my grandfather had been.
You can guess the answer.
He hadn’t.
At first, we assumed that this time the guest list would be limited to people with children, and that the uncles — his parents’ siblings — wouldn’t be invited. But they were. All of them. Once again, my grandfather was the only one left out. This, after having invited Lucas and his family just days earlier to his own celebration.
When my mother realized that he had, once again, invited every uncle while excluding her father — despite having been welcomed into our family’s celebration, something in her snapped. I had never seen her like that. Not once in my life.
She was furious. Deeply offended. Completely inconsolable. Her anger went far beyond what felt reasonable or manageable. I tried to calm her down, but there was no getting through. It was as if she had been overtaken by something, possessed by an evil spirit.
I tried to bring some common sense into the conversation, to calm her down, but it was useless. She said she was hanging up and that she was going to call my aunt Rosely — the one I opened the store with, my grandfather’s sister, who had been invited and is, frankly, quite the gossip.
About half an hour later, I received a message from my aunt.
“Ná, try to calm your mom. I’ve never seen her this nervous. She was actually shaking.”
As much as I understood her anger, I couldn’t justify that level of emotional collapse over a birthday party. I texted my mom again, still trying to soothe her, but it was pointless. She was beyond reach.
She started sending messages about Lucas, calling him names — words like “son of a bitch,” “vermin.” Words I had never, ever heard my mother use. Seeing her write those things left me stunned. I didn’t recognize her in that moment, and I think that was what shocked me the most.
Since I couldn’t calm her down, I went to bed. You were sleeping at your grandparents’ house that night, and the next morning I decided to go pick you up and talk to them in person. According to my mom, my dad was furious too, which was surprising, because he has never been the kind of person to get worked up over things like parties.
But maybe there’s some truth to what people say: when you live with someone long enough, you start to resemble them in ways you never expected — little habits, little reactions, even in moments like these.
I decided not only to go to their house to pick you up, but also to talk about everything that had happened. Once, I told your father that his moral compass felt unbalanced, that he was too quick to judge my parents instead of recognizing the many good things they have done. And now, I feel I need to say the same thing to my parents.
Their moral compass feels unbalanced too.
The level of anger they directed at one person, the desire to completely cut ties, the name-calling, the rage, felt disproportionate. Especially when I think about other situations we have lived with far more quietly. For instance, we still coexist with my uncle, a pedophile, out of consideration for my aunt. And yet, even in that case, my mother never displayed the kind of fury she showed now toward Lucas.
And we are talking about sexual abuse committed against her own daughter.
Even my other uncle, the one who is a pedophile, the one my father cut off completely, when my great-grandfather passed away and they crossed paths for the first time since I had told my dad everything… I think I’ve already told you about that episode.
At the funeral, that uncle reached out his hand to my father. My dad stared straight through him and refused to shake it. And yet, later, my father felt bad about it. Almost guilty. As if he had done something wrong.
And honestly… I get it. My father has an enormous heart. I do too, maybe that’s where I get it from. But still, he felt remorse for refusing a gesture from someone who would have justified every ounce of anger in the world.
And now we’re witnessing this level of rage toward someone else because of a birthday invitation?
It makes no sense to me. Babe… to me, it’s just.... a party.
So when I got there, I tried to say all of this to them. But emotions quickly escalated on every side, and as always, I started to cry.
I cried out of pure nervousness. especially after my mother said that I don’t care about my family. About them.
That’s when something snapped in me. I got extremely upset. And when I get that upset, I cry.
How could she say I don’t care about my family?
I’m the one who cares the most. The one who worries, who overthinks, who carries concern to excess, even my parents say that. And now I’m being told I don’t care?
I worry so much that I’ve put a tracker in their car, out of sheer fear that something might happen to them. That’s how far my anxiety goes. So hearing that accusation made me furious. Deeply, genuinely angry.
That sentence hit harder than anything else that day.
Later, my mother apologized for the awful thing she had said. I was still shaken, still upset, and still unable to understand why all of that chaos had erupted over a party. But I could see, clearly, that I wasn’t going to change the way they think, and they weren’t going to change mine either.
And yet, something stayed with me. Something I learned.
They often dismiss many of your father’s concerns as nonsense. And your father has told me, more than once, that for him those things aren’t nonsense at all, they matter. And now, the same thing was happening in reverse. Even though, to me, this whole situation felt trivial, to them it was important.
That was my moment of realization. Not everything that looks like nonsense to us is nonsense to others. Sometimes, to someone else, it simply… matters. And that should be enough.
When I told your father this whole story, he agreed with and saidt it was absurd to get so worked up over something so small, that these things are minor and irrelevant. And that’s when I said the same thing to him, reminding him that he’s been in situations others considered insignificant, but that mattered deeply to him. And that maybe he shouldn’t dismiss other people’s “problems” so quickly either. He agreed and even told me I was being very mature, joking that it wasn’t exactly in my nature.
Thank God I don’t care if I’m not invited to something. Honestly, I prefer it that way. If someone invites me, I want it to be because they genuinely want me there, not out of obligation, not out of fear that I might get offended.
Like Marcela’s wedding, for example. I knew exactly why I wasn’t invited, and I was fine with it. I knew the invitation, had it come, would have been out of courtesy, not desire. And I’d rather be absent than politely misplaced.
Anyway, we’ll wait for the next episodes of this real-life Mexican family soap opera.
I’ve decided not to judge anymore. And not to feed the subject either.
That said, my parents would be deeply hurt if I went to this party. So even though I’ve already bought the gift and would actually like to go, I won’t. Not this time. I’ll stay away to avoid further conflict.
I hate doing something I believe is wrong just to keep the peace. I really do. But this time, I’ll make an exception because they’re my parents.
