Valeria was the first to show it.
At seven years old, she would sit at the kitchen table with a pencil so short it nearly disappeared in her hand and solve arithmetic problems faster than the teacher could write them on the board. By ten, she was helping her father calculate wood costs, delivery routes, and customer balances with a precision that made grown men blink. She saw numbers the way other people saw weather. Patterns. Pressure. Probability. Doors.
Camila was different.
Where Valeria loved order, Camila loved possibility. She drew on scrap wood, on the backs of invoices, on old newspapers, on anything that would take a mark. She turned broken hinges into little sculptures and leftover paint into color charts. By twelve, she was designing flyers for neighborhood businesses with borrowed markers and teaching herself the language of branding before she even knew the word branding belonged to people in expensive offices.
Then there was Sofía.
If Valeria was the mind and Camila the imagination, Sofía was the blade. Focused. Steady. Impossible to intimidate. She was the one who stared down bullies at school, challenged teachers who underestimated her sisters, and refused every shrinking lesson the world tried to hand her. When boys laughed at their clothes or their lunch, Sofía looked at them with such cold certainty that even adults stepped back.
You might think a man raising three daughters alone would spend his life merely trying to keep disaster away from the door.
But Don Rafael did more than protect them.
He trained them to expect more from the world than mercy.
At night, after the dishes were washed and the little house finally quieted, he would sit with them at the table and say things that sounded too big for their circumstances.
