In that building where Madrid had risen trying to reach the clouds, she waited. Those sunset colors would be the last she would see, that was for sure. She did not need to waste seconds remembering but it was inevitable that her thoughts would swirl and hit her skull as if inside her head there was a punk party.

The sunset contained all the beauty that she could never reach. While she watched it, she felt vulnerable, terribly fragile and ashamed, as if the breeze lifted her dress in the middle of the church. She smiled. It was ironic that her last moments had so much light when her whole life had remained submerged in darkness. Her body felt heavy and weak. She needed to sit down, the sedatives began to take effect and it was not convenient to faint in the middle of that place. No... She had not climbed up there to faint.

She found a seat on the edge of the rooftop, just where the security ended. The cold granite adhered to her naked skin immediately, producing brief chills that went up from her hips to her neck. Perhaps because of the proximity of death or because the world did not care anymore, her fear of heights had disappeared. She felt powerful, something not very frequent considering that she had only experienced it, counting this occasion, three times in her life. Thus, in an act that she considered reckless, she began to move her feet, with great difficulty, in the air, near the loading wall of the 31st floor. Enjoying the last seconds of her life.

That was the tallest building in the city, so close to heaven that it seemed to announce: "very soon human beings will be gods." From that height, the world seemed an oasis of peace, as if life were a soft breeze caressing a smooth and disheveled hair. The cars followed their course of kilometers; people chasing their dreams and living seemed to make sense from up there. Sense... although not for her.

Catherine Low was born on one of the grayest mornings of 1987, or at least that was what Beatriz, her mother, assured her with the greatest possible contempt. Every day, with the patience of those who knit a sweater, she threw the contempt and the suffering that caused her to see the little girl. Her voice took on a dead tone, full of hate and misery, that often drove Catherine to tears when her mother, maliciously, recited that old story.

"When you were born, God ate the sun for hours, as a symbol of a curse." She underlined each word with special care as if she enjoyed that little torture he could afford. "You, girl, are a curse. My curse."

That was what Catherine's life was about. She listened to those words every day regardless of the effort or dedication she delivered when cleaning the house, taking care of the gardens or going to the nearby forest in search of fruits. None of that mattered. She always got the same words, without fail, as in a dream from which she could not wake up.

For this reason, Beatriz did not need more effort to isolate her little daughter from the world. Living in Lugo, a tiny town in Galicia, she spent the first years of her life without friends or distractions. However, Catherine was forced to spend most of her time cleaning the house and trying to find an explanation for her mother's infinite rage. From an early age, she adopted the habit of speaking with inanimate objects, especially with her pillow to which she continually demanded some answers. She subjected it to harsh interrogations that began by keeping fixed those big black eyes until the silence consumed Catherine. Then, she proceeded to exert a dose of violence and hit it with all the frustration accumulated during the day. The poor pillow ended with small scratches and was relegated to some corner of the bed while Catherine cried. The crying came out naturally, pure, inevitable and mingled with her fine little threads of voice, which seemed a plea and were choked as more words emitted. Thus, no matter how hard she asked her infantile mind or inanimate objects, she slept with her eyes swollen and repeating to herself with an increasingly weak voice: "Why am I cursed?"

Over time, her parents began to take her to church and after listening to many sermons, she began to feel stupid for looking for answers on the pillow. "What was I thinking?" she lamented. "The answer is in speaking directly with God." Since then, every night she knelt before the large window of her room, which filtered the moon's rays to her pale little body dressed in old rags and she apologized from the depths of her heart. She apologized as the most sinful heretic, without knowing what she was guilty of, but regretting not having the ability to understand it, ashamed of her ignorance, feeling terrible for causing so much pain to her mother. She prayed. Silently, pressing the rosary between the little fingers of both hands, feeling that the soul and the energy were escaped with each word, she prayed. And at the end, she doubled her body forward, in a posture of complete submission, in a bow that pushed her forehead to the floor and begged for the forgiveness. That way she stayed for hours until the cold made her shiver and numbed her body, although nothing weighed more than feeling empty, ignored... rejected by God. Then she would get up and let herself fall, defeated, on the bed. She looked at the ceiling and little by little closed those eyes, which by force of crying were drying up, sure that no one would help her. Convinced that she was cursed.

Catherine looked for the answers in the wrong places. Of course, her childish mind made it impossible for her to access a reality. If she had been a little older, perhaps she would have realized that the origin of this excessive hatred was in the bosom of the Low family. She did not know it, but the truth is always hidden in many lies, although for her, little by little a unique, unbreakable and eternal truth was forming in the depths of her heart. At that moment she did not know what it was exactly, but there was something that Catherine was beginning to understand very slowly: she really hated her mother.