There’s something quietly painful about feeling alone in a room filled with people celebrating love.
Marco Salazar had learned to carry that feeling the way one carries an old scar: no longer sharp with fresh pain, but with a lingering heaviness that surfaced when he least expected it. Like that afternoon, seated at a round table near the tall windows of the Imperial Room in an elegant hotel in downtown Mexico City, watching arrangements of white flowers glow in the golden light.
He held his teacup with both hands, just as his mother had taught him when he was seven. He was forty-one, though most people assumed he was younger. He wore a navy suit with the same care a man uses when putting on armor—deliberately, precisely, hoping it would say something about who he wanted to be, not just who he was in that moment.
A single father.
A man whose wife had left three years earlier, on an ordinary Tuesday, leaving behind a handwritten note on the kitchen counter—and his six-year-old daughter, Lucía, sitting at the table drawing butterflies with crayons, unaware that his world had just shifted forever.
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