My husband wrote to me, just like that, without warning: “You’re not going on the cruise anymore. Clara wants her real mom.”
I read that sentence over and over. “Real mom”… the same woman who left when Clara was three and never came back.
I called. I wrote. Her silence was the second blow.

Five Years as “The Perfect Stepmother”
My name is Marina, I’m 32 years old, and for five years I ran that house as if it were my mission.
I took Clara to school, helped her with her homework, cooked her favorite meals, hugged her on her bad days, and celebrated every achievement as my own.
I didn’t care that she didn’t call me “Mom.” I was her in every way: in care, in time, in love.

When love began to feel like rejection
, Clara suddenly changed.
She shut herself away, avoided talking to me, stopped asking for my help, and even locked her room.
I tried to explain it away as pre-adolescence, as a phase… but something inside me knew it wasn’t just that.
When I talked to Roberto about it, he downplayed it. “You’re exaggerating,” he said. And I was left alone with my intuition.