Massive heart attack. Could’ve happened anytime. Nothing anyone could’ve done.
I knew better.
The stress killed him—day by day, worry by worry. The notice from Devlin Holdings, the deadline he couldn’t meet, the future he couldn’t secure for us. The phone calls that went nowhere, the letters no one answered, the security guard who wouldn’t let him past the lobby.
And then all at once, on a stairwell in a building we were being forced to leave.
My mother didn’t cry. She just stopped, stopped talking, stopped moving, stopped being present. I sat beside her in the hospital waiting room and watched her disappear into somewhere I couldn’t follow.
The funeral happened four days before we had to vacate the apartment.
I planned everything alone. Picked the casket, wrote the obituary, called relatives who couldn’t afford to come, made arrangements with a funeral home that offered payment plans for people like us. People who couldn’t afford to bury their dead the way they deserved.
My mother sat silent through all of it, hollow and unreachable. She attended the funeral in a black dress I’d bought from a thrift store, stood at the graveside without crying, without speaking, without anything.
Twenty-two years old, burying my father while packing up our life and trying to figure out where we’d sleep next week.
People came to the funeral and said things that didn’t help. He’s in a better place. Time heals all wounds. Stay strong. God has a plan.
I wanted to scream at them, wanted to ask where this better place was when we needed him here, wanted to know what plan involved killing a good man who’d worked his entire life and never hurt anyone.
Instead I smiled and said thank you and accepted casseroles we had nowhere to store.
We ended up in a shelter.
The apartment had to be emptied by Friday so I packed everything we owned into boxes and bags. Left most of it in a storage unit we couldn’t afford long-term, took only what we could carry, took my mother to a women’s shelter in the Bronx that had two beds available.
The place smelled like industrial cleaner and quiet despair. Bunk beds lined the walls, communal bathrooms, rules posted everywhere about quiet hours and possession limits and how long you could stay before they moved you along.
My mother had her first full breakdown that night.
Screaming, hyperventilating, clawing at her arms like something was trying to escape beneath her skin. The shelter staff called an ambulance and they sedated her, kept her overnight for observation, sent her back the next morning with prescriptions we couldn’t afford and recommendations for therapy we definitely couldn’t afford.
I dropped out of law school.
Not officially, I just stopped going. Stopped answering emails from professors asking where I was, stopped checking the student portal, stopped thinking about my future because Ididn’t have the luxury of a future when I was trying to keep us both alive in the present.
I got jobs. Waitressing, cleaning offices at night, anything that paid cash and didn’t ask questions. I worked doubles, sometimes triples, slept three hours a night when I slept at all, saved every penny toward getting us out of that shelter and into something permanent.
My mother’s mental health got worse before it got better. Panic attacks became daily occurrences, multiple times a day sometimes, and she developed paranoid episodes. Convinced people were following us, that the walls had cameras, that someone was trying to hurt us.
I learned which phrases calmed her down and which ones triggered her worse. Learned how to talk her through attacks when they hit in public, learned how to function on no sleep and constant fear that I’d wake up one day and she’d be gone too.
Until Hector found us.
My mother was selling flowers on a Manhattan street corner that day.
He bought an orchid, some rare variety his late wife had loved, and asked if she needed work. He had hired her on the spot to be his housekeeper.
Hector Valdez changed our lives with one decision.
He had given us the apartment in Queens, furnished it, paid my mother enough that I could quit two of my three jobs and gave us stability for the first time since our world tore apart.
I blinked and I was back in my apartment, staring at the folder on my table.
Devlin Holdings.
The company that killed my father, the company that shattered my mother’s mind, the company that stole seven years of my life.
