She managed people.

She had promised Xiomara a lavish wedding not out of a mother’s tenderness but because a lavish wedding served Leticia — it displayed the family’s status, it flattered her authority, it kept her daughter grateful and pliant.

And when the manor’s debts came due, Leticia had reached for the wedding money without a flicker of hesitation, because the wedding had never really been Xiomara’s; it had been another of Leticia’s assets, to be liquidated when a more pressing need arose.

Xiomara had spent her whole life on the other side of her mother’s favor from Rafaela, the beloved daughter to the despised in-law, and she had believed the favor was love.

She was learning, in front of twenty relatives, that it had only ever been the same transaction from a more comfortable seat.

The little princess of the family and the city princess they’d left in the rain turned out to be the same thing to Leticia after all: sources of money, valued exactly as long as the money lasted.