Chapter 1 - The Hollow Floorboard
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They had barely buried my son when my daughter-in-law told me to leave the four-million-dollar house.
I was still wearing my black funeral dress. My hands were trembling from lowering my only son into the ground, and before the grief had even settled, she had already decided that everything under that roof belonged to her.
My name is Eulalia. For years, I had cooked in that kitchen, scrubbed those floors, ironed shirts, set the table, welcomed guests, and swallowed insults because my son, Neftalí, was still there. I kept telling myself I could endure anything as long as I could still hear his footsteps in that house.
Then Neftalí died.
My daughter-in-law, Valeria, took the house, the furniture, the silver, the closets—everything. For me, she set out two old suitcases and handed me the keys to a crumbling cabin deep in the mountains. No electricity. No running water. No neighbors.
Before leaving, I asked for one thing: a framed photograph of my son.
Valeria stepped between me and the picture as though I were stealing from her. “Everything in this house belongs to me now.” Her voice wasn’t loud. That somehow made it worse. She sounded calm, almost satisfied, like she had been waiting years for the chance to say those words without Neftalí there to stop her.
Then she opened the front door and pointed toward the dirt road. “Go. You wanted so badly to be his mother. Now go mourn him somewhere else.”
The trip to the cabin felt less like moving and more like being erased. My shoes sank into mud while branches snapped around me in the dark. By the time I reached the place, my funeral dress was damp at the hem and both suitcases were streaked with dirt.
The cabin was worse than I imagined: cracked windows, damp walls, and a sour, sealed smell. An old cradle sat in one corner and a broken chair in another. There was nowhere I could look that didn’t feel abandoned.
I sat on the floor holding Neftalí’s photograph against my chest, and something ugly rose through my grief: anger at my own son. I had spent years protecting him from having to choose between his wife and his mother. Now he was gone, and I was the one paying for every choice he had avoided.
That first night, I nearly burned his photograph. I held the frame in both hands, crying so hard my chest hurt, furious that he had died and left me with the woman who despised me most. But I couldn’t do it. I pressed the picture against my chest instead and cried until exhaustion finally pulled me down beside my suitcases.
The next morning, cold air pushed through the cracked windows. In one corner I noticed an old broom. Something in me hardened. If that cabin was where she expected me to disappear, I would at least make it mine before I did.
I swept the floor. I pulled cobwebs from the walls. I stacked broken objects together and opened the windows enough to let in the smell of wet earth and pine. Then, beneath years of grime in the farthest corner, I uncovered a small wooden altar.
My hands stopped moving. Neftalí had brought that altar here years earlier, back when he still talked about fixing up the cabin someday. I remembered the care he took carrying it inside. At the time, I had dismissed it as another sentimental thing he couldn’t throw away. Now it was the only thing in the cabin that felt deliberately placed.
I wiped the wood clean with my sleeve and set his photograph on top. Looking for something that could hold a candle, I found an old iron candlestick among rusted kitchen utensils and broken jars. It was heavy, rough with rust, and almost useless. My fingers were still unsteady. The candlestick slipped.
It slammed into the floor beside the altar.
The sound stopped me cold. Not the soft thud of rotten wood. Not the ordinary crack of an old cabin settling.
Hollow.
May you like
I lowered myself to my knees and ran my fingertips across the boards. Dust caught beneath my nails as I followed the grain until my fingers found something that should not have been there. A narrow seam. Perfectly straight. And it ran directly beneath the altar Neftalí had carried into this cabin years before.
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