When Teresa stepped down from the truck, the ground cracked beneath her sandals like something brittle and exhausted. The sun in southern Mexico showed no mercy—it pressed down on everything with equal cruelty: the rusted tin roofs, the twisted mesquite trees, the dry riverbeds reduced to pale scars across the land. It was the early twentieth century, in a forgotten corner of Guerrero where water held more value than coins, and survival was measured not in years, but in how many buckets one could carry before collapsing.
In this place, a deep well meant prosperity. Without one, it meant walking miles beneath a burning sky, praying for rain that came so rarely it felt like a rumor rather than a promise.
Teresa was only thirty-two, yet grief had carved deep lines into her face. Just months earlier, a fever had taken her husband in less than three days. No warning. No farewell. One moment he was alive, the next he was wrapped in cloth and lowered into the ground. Overnight, Teresa became a widow with two small daughters and a handful of pesos she guarded as carefully as a candle flame in the wind.
Going back to her parents’ house meant surrender—living under endless pity and the same narrow future offered to women who dared to be alone. Staying meant gambling everything on herself.
“I can do this,” she whispered. Not as a declaration—but as a plea she hoped the earth might hear.
That was why she bought the land no one wanted.
The plot sat far from the river, abandoned for years. The house was barely standing, its roof caved in, its walls warped by time. The soil was so compacted and lifeless that even weeds refused to claim it. When the village notary sold it to her, he shook his head gently.
