“Yes?”
My voice was weak.
“It’s me. He left me here.”
Silence. Not disorientation. Control.
“Stay there,” he said.
“How…?”
“Don’t move. Give me your location. Immediately.”
I did so, though my hands were shaking. I stared at the arrivals corridor as if it were a screen on which the scene was about to change. There was no hope inside me, only a kind of emptiness. If he didn’t come back, I was nothing to anyone.
Thirty minutes later, the airport was bustling with activity. Ground staff were working diligently. A black car with a special permit pulled up. The man with the phone asked my name. I stood up, confused.
“Are you Camila Montes?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Follow me.”
He led me out a side door, away from the crowd, to a designated area. And then I saw it through the large window: a private jet landing.
My legs almost gave out. Not from the luxury. But from the brutal certainty: my father, the “absent one,” had changed my world in half an hour.
A tall man appeared on the steps of the jet. Dark suit. A piercing gaze. He didn’t smile. He simply spread his arms, as if on cue.
And I realized that being abandoned by my mother had just activated the most dangerous part of him.
When he returned from vacation… he would find my room empty.
And an official notification would be waiting for her.
The plane smelled of new leather and coffee. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, or what to do with the tears that finally welled up in my eyes. My father sat across from me, not touching me, as if needing reassurance of my existence.
“Did he leave you alone at the airport in Mexico City?” he asked in a flat voice.
I nodded. I pulled the ticket out of my pocket and handed it to him as ID.
She looked at him for two seconds, long enough to understand everything: the budget airline, the endless layover, the half-checked box for “unaccompanied minors.”
“Did he say anything?” she asked.
