My father stopped calling me.
The trial didn’t send anyone to prison. It wasn’t necessary. The condemnation was social, silent, and permanent. In Valencia , rumors travel fast. No one ever looked at my father the same way again.
He lost respect, then his job. My uncles drifted apart, like rats abandoning a sinking ship.
I didn’t celebrate anything. I never wanted to see them fall. I just wanted them to stop lying.
My grandfather started walking along the seafront every morning. He greeted strangers. He laughed again.
“I didn’t know life was so simple,” he once told me. “I had been led to believe it was impossible.”
A year after the wedding, we celebrated her seventy-eighth birthday. This time, no one laughed. No one was absent out of embarrassment. New friends came, neighbors, even some distant relatives who apologized.
My father didn’t come.
It didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would.
Because I understood something: family isn’t always the one who shares your blood, but the one who doesn’t hide you when you’re in the way .
The San Gabriel nursing home is still there. We returned to donate some of the money we recovered. We placed a small plaque in the garden.
“ A wedding was celebrated here for love and in memory .”
And every time someone asks why we got married there, I smile.
Because I’m not ashamed of anything anymore.
