The silence in the mansion on Aristóteles Street, in the heart of Polanco, wasn’t a peaceful silence; it was a cold, heavy, marble silence that echoed with a loneliness no bank check could fill. Guillermo Salinas, at 34, had it all. Or at least, that’s what the business magazines said, heaping praise on his real estate empire. He had built gravity-defying skyscrapers in Mexico City, closed deals others considered impossible, and amassed a fortune that secured the future of the next three generations of his family. But that afternoon, as he gazed through his office window at the city’s gray skyline, he realized his empire was a house of cards about to be brought down by a breath of reality.

Everything had changed with a routine visit to the pediatrician. What should have been a simple checkup for his son Diego, a lively seven-year-old boy with a smile capable of lighting up a stadium, turned into the cruelest sentence a parent could hear. Dr. Mendoza’s words still echoed in Guillermo’s ears, not as medical phrases, but like hammer blows. “Acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Aggressive. Incurable.” Time, that resource Guillermo always believed he could manage and optimize, had suddenly become sand slipping through his fingers. Six months, if he was lucky. One month without treatment.

Guillermo’s meticulously organized life, filled with schedules and meetings, crumbled. His wife, Elena, had died in a car accident three years earlier, leaving a void he had tried to fill with work and expensive gifts for Diego. Now, the prospect of losing the only thing he had left of her, his sole reason for waking up each morning, paralyzed him. The mansion ceased to be a home and became a sterile, luxury clinic. Uniformed nurses came and went with somber faces, the smell of disinfectant replaced the aroma of coffee and toast, and Diego’s toys were left forgotten in corners as the boy spent his days in bed, too weak to be the superhero he used to imagine.

Guillermo felt useless. He could yell at a contractor, he could negotiate millions, but he didn’t know how to meet his son’s gaze when the pain appeared. He didn’t know how to be both mother and father in the midst of tragedy. It was at that breaking point, when darkness seemed to have won the battle, that Lourdes Villagrán crossed the threshold.

Lourdes wasn’t what Guillermo expected. She didn’t wear the starched white uniform or have that professionally pitying expression the others had. At 29, Lourdes brought a different kind of energy. She came from Xochimilco, with a life story marked by her own scars, but she wore vibrant colors and had a smile that didn’t ask for permission. When she entered Diego’s room for the first time, she didn’t look at the monitors, the tubes, or the medications; she looked at the boy.

“Good morning, Diego,” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed as if they had known each other forever. “My name is Lourdes, but you can call me Lulu. I didn’t come here to give you injections; that’s what boring doctors are for. I came here to be your friend.”

Diego, who had been in a sad lethargy for weeks, opened his eyes with curiosity. The boy’s initial distrust dissolved when Lourdes proposed something unheard of in that house of rules and silences: cooking, playing, and using his imagination as a passport to escape those four walls. Guillermo watched from the doorway, skeptical at first, but desperate to see a spark of life in his son. And he saw it. He saw Diego’s eyes light up when Lourdes promised him they would make the best cake in the world.

As the days passed, Lourdes transformed the somber atmosphere of the house. If Diego couldn’t go to the beach, Lourdes brought the beach to him, filling the room with sand in a box and photos of the Caribbean, putting a straw hat on him, and telling him stories of fishermen until the boy felt the sea breeze in his imagination. She didn’t treat him like a terminally ill patient; she treated him like a child who had the right to savor every last drop of his childhood, no matter how short it might be.

Guillermo started arriving home from work earlier. Urgent meetings ceased to be urgent. He found himself rushing home not to hide in his office, but to see what new adventure Lourdes and Diego had created. One afternoon, he found them fishing for toy fish in a bucket of water in the middle of the living room. Diego’s laughter, a sound Guillermo feared he had forgotten, filled the air.

“Dad, I caught twelve fish!” Diego shouted, with a vitality that belied his medical tests. “And Lulu says that tomorrow we’re going to be jungle explorers.”

Guillermo looked at Lourdes. She was mopping up the mess with a towel, but she met his gaze with a serenity that disarmed him. There was something about her, a quiet strength, a deep understanding of pain that didn’t need words. That night, while Diego slept, Lourdes looked for Guillermo in the kitchen. The house was silent; only the hum of the refrigerator accompanied the tension that hung in the air.

“Mr. Salinas, Diego asked me today if he’s going to die,” Lourdes said bluntly, holding her coffee cup.

Guillermo’s heart stopped for a moment. It was the question he had been avoiding, the reality he refused to verbalize.

“What… what did you say to her?” he stammered, feeling a lump in his throat.

“I told him that’s a conversation he needs to have with his father. But sir, children know. They have an intuition that adults lose. Diego knows he’s fading away, and the silence only frightens him. If you talk to him, if we give him permission to understand, perhaps the fear will disappear and we can truly make the most of the time we have left.”

Guillermo spent the night awake, battling his own demons. The next morning, his heart pounding in his chest, he went into his son’s room. He sat on the bed and, taking Diego’s small hands in his own, had the most difficult and courageous conversation of his life. There were no white lies. There were tears, there were hugs that tried to merge two souls, and there was a liberating truth. Diego didn’t cry from fear; he cried with relief at knowing he wasn’t alone on his journey. And it was then, in that moment of utter vulnerability, that the miracle occurred that would change the course of his final days. Diego, with a wisdom beyond his years, decided that if he was going to leave, he would leave having lived everything he had dreamed of.

“Dad,” said Diego, wiping his tears with the back of his hand, “if I’m going to leave soon, I need to make a list.”

“A list?” Guillermo asked, confused.

—Yes. A list of things I want to do before… you know. Important things.

That list, written in colored crayons in a school notebook, became the sacred mission of the house. He didn’t ask for trips to Disney or expensive toys. His wishes were heartbreakingly pure: “To bake a giant cake,” “To see snow,” “To have a dog for a day,” “To see the sunrise,” “For Dad to smile again.” But there was one last wish that Diego didn’t write down, one he kept in his heart and that only Lourdes sensed, a wish that would unleash a chain of emotional events that no one saw coming.

The execution of Diego’s wish list became a race against time, but not a frantic one; rather, one filled with deliberate love and pause. The house in Polanco, once a mausoleum of coldness, now vibrated with a chaotic and beautiful energy.

The first task, “Make a giant cake,” transformed the pristine granite kitchen into a battlefield of flour and chocolate. Guillermo, the man who never took off his tie, ended up with his face smeared with frosting, laughing uproariously as Diego and Lourdes tried to decorate a misshapen tower of bread that, in the boy’s eyes, was the most impressive architectural work in the world. At that moment, Guillermo understood what Lourdes had been trying to tell him without words: happiness wasn’t in the result, but in the shared chaos of the process.

Then came the dog. Max, a borrowed Golden Retriever, ran around the garden, chased by Diego, who, though he tired quickly, radiated a light that seemed to come from another dimension. They planted a small, fragile jacaranda tree, promising it would grow strong. “This tree is me, Dad,” Diego had said as they covered the roots with soil. “When I’m gone, he’ll greet you every morning.” Guillermo had to bite his lip to keep from breaking down right there, but Lourdes was by his side, and her firm, warm presence gave him the strength to smile and nod.

But it was point number seven, “Watching the Sunrise,” that marked a turning point in the relationship between the three of them. One November morning, they climbed to the roof of the mansion. It was cold, a bone-chilling cold, but Diego, wrapped in blankets like a small tamale, was determined. He sat on his father’s lap, with Lourdes right beside him. As Mexico City awoke, painting the sky oranges and violets above the buildings, Diego sighed.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” whispered the boy, his voice weakened by the progression of the disease.

Guillermo wasn’t looking at the sun; he was looking at his son. And then, he looked at Lourdes. The dawn light illuminated the woman’s face, revealing a single tear running down her cheek as she gazed at Diego with a love that transcended any employment contract. In that instant, in the intimacy of the sunrise, Guillermo felt the last barriers of his heart crumble.

“Thank you,” he whispered to her, taking advantage of the fact that Diego had fallen asleep from the exertion.

“You don’t have to thank me,” she replied, without taking her eyes off the horizon. “He’s healing me too. My brother died of the same thing, Guillermo. I was just a child and couldn’t do anything. With Diego… with Diego I feel like I’m making up for lost time. I’m giving him the childhood my brother never had.”

Guillermo felt a shiver. He understood that fate hadn’t brought a mere employee to his home; it had brought a kindred spirit in grief, someone who understood the silent language of loss. Their hands brushed accidentally on Diego’s blanket, and for a second, neither of them pulled away. It was an electric connection, charged with an unspoken promise of mutual support in the face of the coming storm.

December arrived with its festive air, a cruel contrast to the reality inside the house. Diego’s health visibly declined. His sleep periods lengthened, his pallor became more pronounced, and he barely had enough strength to smile. However, his spirit remained unbroken. Two items remained on his list: “Dad’s birthday party” and “Learning to play a song on the guitar.”

Guillermo’s birthday, on December 15th, was an intimate celebration. There were no business associates or expensive champagne. There were balloons inflated by Lourdes herself, drawings Diego made from his bed, and a simple cake. When Guillermo blew out the candles, his wish was so intense it hurt his chest: More time. Just a little more time. Diego, with a lucidity that was sometimes frightening, told him: “Don’t ask me to stay, Dad. Ask to be happy even if I’m not here.”

That phrase haunted Guillermo. How could he be happy without him? The answer came with the last wish on the list. Diego wanted to play “Las Mañanitas” on the guitar. His fingers, thin and fragile, barely had the strength to press the strings. Guillermo bought him a small guitar, and for days, the room was filled with out-of-tune sounds and soft laughter.

Lourdes had the idea that saved the moment. “Let’s do it together,” she suggested. “Diego, you put your fingers in. I’ll help you press. And your dad sings. We’re a band.”

On the afternoon of December 23, the “band” gave its only concert. Diego, reclining on pillows, placed his fingers where Lourdes indicated. She, with infinite patience, applied the necessary pressure to the strings. Guillermo, his voice breaking and his eyes clouded over, began to sing. “These are the birthday songs that King David sang…”

The music flowed, imperfect, clumsy, but charged with a love so pure it seemed to vibrate in the walls. When they finished, Diego put down his guitar and clapped weakly. “We did it, Dad. I’m a musician.” “You’re the best musician in the world, son,” Guillermo replied, kissing his forehead, feeling the fever burning the boy’s skin.

That night, the decline accelerated. Diego entered a state of deep sleep from which it was difficult to rouse him. Guillermo and Lourdes took turns keeping watch, not leaving him alone for a second. In the dead hours of the early morning, in the kitchen, while they prepared strong coffee to fight off sleep, their conversation became their only refuge.

“I’m scared, Lourdes,” Guillermo confessed one night, letting his tough-guy mask fall away. “I don’t know who I am without him. I don’t know how I’ll breathe when he stops.” Lourdes approached him and, breaking all protocol, took his hands. “You will breathe because he taught you how to truly breathe. Before, you were just surviving, Guillermo. Now you’re living. Diego taught you to feel, to cry, to laugh at simple things. That’s his legacy. And you won’t be alone. I… I don’t plan on going anywhere as long as you need me.”

The confession hung in the air, a promise of the future amidst the grief.

The end came on January 1st. While outside the city celebrated the New Year with fireworks and music, inside the room a sacred peace reigned. Diego woke up in the afternoon, with a sudden clarity that doctors call “the near-death sharp.” He looked around, focusing his eyes on his father and then on Lourdes. “Dad…” he whispered. “I’m here, champ.” “I want… I want to bake a cake.”

Guillermo and Lourdes exchanged a pained glance. Diego could barely lift his head. How was he going to cook? But Lourdes, with her infinite wisdom, understood. It wasn’t about the cake. It was about normalcy, about family, about doing something together one last time. “Of course, my love,” she said. “We’ll bring everything here to the bed. You’ll be the chef and you’ll tell us what to do.”

They took a bowl, eggs, and flour to the bed. Guided by Diego’s whispers, they mixed the ingredients. It was a surreal and divine scene: two heartbroken adults mixing dough under the direction of an angel preparing to depart. “Slower, Dad, gently,” Diego corrected. When the mixture was ready, Diego no longer had the strength to taste it. He simply smiled, closed his eyes, and whispered his last words, addressed to both of them: “Thank you for letting me be happy.”

Diego Salinas passed away at the dawn of the new year, holding his father in one hand and Lourdes in the other. He departed without pain, having completed his list, having united two lonely souls, and having left a trail of light that would never be extinguished.

Three months later, spring had arrived in Polanco. In the garden of the house, the small Jacaranda tree that Diego had planted was blooming, a burst of violet against the blue sky. Guillermo was there, carefully watering the soil, when Lourdes appeared with two cups of coffee. She was no longer the nurse, nor the housekeeper; she was the companion, the partner in memory and in life.

“He’s growing fast,” she said, handing him the coffee. “Yes. You were right. He’s strong, just like him,” Guillermo replied, taking a sip. The pain was still there, sharp and constant, but it was no longer a bottomless pit. Now it was a clean wound healing in the sun.

“You know,” Guillermo continued, looking at the tree. “For a long time, I thought my success was buildings, money, power. But Diego taught me that my only true success was making that misshapen cake, planting this tree, and… finding you.” Lourdes smiled, and in her smile, Guillermo saw the reflection of Diego’s joy. “Love isn’t measured in time, Guillermo. It’s measured in intensity. Diego lived seven years, but he loved more than many people who live a hundred. And he left us with a task.” “What?” “To keep living. To keep making giant cakes and watching sunrises.”

Guillermo set the cup down on the grass and took Lourdes’s hand. “Lourdes, would you like to plant another tree? One for us. For this new beginning.” “I’d love to,” she replied, squeezing his hand.

The breeze stirred the branches of the jacaranda tree, and for a moment, amidst the rustling of the leaves, they both swore they heard a child’s laughter, crystalline and eternal, approving the new chapter of their lives. Diego was gone, but in the garden of that house, and in the hearts of Guillermo and Lourdes, life, stubborn and beautiful, was blooming again. Because even when the night is darkest, the sun always, inevitably, rises again.