But they forgot one thing.
When you fall all the way to the bottom, the only place left to go is up. And I wasn’t just rising for myself anymore. I was rising for the life inside me that they couldn’t kill.
I picked up a pen and started my homework. I had a long way to go, but for the first time, I wasn’t afraid of the morning.
Part 3: The Reconstruction of Souls
The courtroom was smaller than I imagined. It didn’t have the grand, mahogany pillars of the movies; it smelled of floor wax and old paper. But as I sat in the witness stand, the weight of the air felt like a physical pressure against my lungs. I was sixteen now. My belly was a prominent curve beneath my white maternity blouse—a living, breathing defiance of everything the Rivas family had tried to bury.
Across the aisle, Mateo looked unrecognizable. The “Golden Boy” tan had faded into a sickly, fluorescent pallor. He didn’t look at me. He couldn’t. Beside him, Mrs. Rebeca Rivas sat like a marble statue, her designer suit a sharp contrast to the cold iron of the situation.
But the person who haunted my dreams wasn’t Mateo. It was the woman in the orange jumpsuit sitting in the back: Aunt Patricia.
The Evidence of Betrayal
The trial centered on the contents of the “calming” tea. The lab results had come back months ago, and the testimony of the toxicologist was a blur of long, scientific names for substances that should never be near a pregnant child.
“The defendant, Patricia Gomez, systematically administered abortifacients under the guise of familial care,” the prosecutor announced, his voice echoing.
I looked at my mother. She was weeping silently, her face buried in my father’s shoulder. To lose a sister and a daughter’s trust in the same breath was a wound that hadn’t begun to scab. My father’s eyes were fixed on the judge, his jaw set so tight I thought his teeth might break. He had spent the last year working double shifts at the warehouse to pay for the lawyers, determined that justice wouldn’t be another thing the wealthy could buy.
