# Part 2
Within ten minutes, Sofia had forty-seven missed calls.
Twenty-six were from Javier.
Not one of them had called while she was actually walking through the storm.
Sofia was sitting in a warm diner off the highway, drinking coffee, when Javier burst through the door soaked and breathing hard.
“You need to talk to your mom right now!”
Sofia looked at him.
“Is that really the first thing you’re going to say to me?”
“That contract was massive for us, Sofia! Tell her it was all a misunderstanding!”
“When your mother left me standing in the rain, why didn’t you get out of the car?”
Javier clenched his jaw.
“I didn’t want to make a scene in front of my mom.”
“And now?”
“Now we’re talking about my family’s entire financial future!”
Sofia gave a quiet, humorless laugh.
He hadn’t come back because he cared that she was stranded.
He had come back because the contract was gone.
Even so, she agreed to return to the manor.
When they arrived, more than twenty relatives were waiting anxiously in the grand living room.
Teresa hurried forward wearing an artificial smile.
“Oh, my sweet girl! Come in! Nobody meant to hurt you. It was all just a joke!”
Sofia stepped back and raised one hand.
“Don’t touch me.”
Mariana spoke from the sofa.
“Gosh, Sofia, don’t be so dramatic! It was just a little walk!”
Sofia didn’t argue.
She pulled a USB drive from her pocket and connected it to the large screen where the family had prepared its presentation for Altavista.
The video began.
“Strangers don’t get rides in my SUV.”
Then Mariana’s laughter filled the room.
Then Javier’s silence.
Teresa’s face turned pale.
“It was harmless hazing!”
Sofia opened the next file.
A screenshot of the family group chat filled the seventy-five-inch screen.
A message from Teresa, sent that morning, read:
**“Today we teach the city girl who’s in charge. I’m going to make her walk from the bus terminal just to knock her off her high horse.”**
The room erupted.
“You recorded that?!” Teresa screamed at Mariana.
“You told me to!” Mariana shouted back.
Relatives immediately started distancing themselves.
An aunt who had written “leave her outside” earlier was suddenly calling the behavior “an absolute disgrace.”
Javier reached for Sofia’s arm……….
