Chapter 10 - A New Foundation
It was a warm Sunday afternoon.
I was sitting on the back porch of our new ranch, holding a mug of coffee. The sun was setting, casting a golden glow over the Sierra Madre mountains in the distance.
Mateo walked out of the garage, wiping grease from his hands with a shop towel. He was wearing an old t-shirt and jeans, a smudge of motor oil on his cheek. He looked exhausted, but it was the good kind of exhaustion. The kind that comes from honest, hard work.
He walked up the porch steps and sat heavily in the chair next to me, sighing contentedly.
“The new diesel engines are ready for the Apodaca site tomorrow,” he smiled, leaning over to kiss my forehead.
“You smell like machinery,” I teased him gently.
Mateo looked at his grease-stained hands. He remembered his father’s cruel words from a lifetime ago. But this time, he didn't look down in shame. He smiled, a genuine, radiant smile.
“Yeah,” Mateo said. “I do.”
I reached over and took his hand, intertwining my clean fingers with his callused, stained ones.
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We didn't need to be kings. We didn't need to project an image of absolute perfection to the world. We had survived the venom of a dynasty, and we had built something far stronger than a house of lies.
We had built the truth. And we had built it together.
