Chapter 11 - THE LAST PERSON HE SAW

My mother remembered the visit.

“He stood outside the gate,” she said. “Your father wouldn’t let him in.”

“What did they say?”

“I couldn’t hear all of it.”

She pulled the blanket higher.

“I heard Jorge say, ‘You can still fix this.’ Your father said, ‘I am fixing it.’”

“And then?”

“Jorge looked up at your bedroom window.”

I had been a child upstairs, probably complaining about homework.

Below me, men had been deciding how dangerous my father was.

Fuentes asked about the day he died.

My mother’s answers came slowly.

He left early.

He kissed her beside the stove.

He said he had one last meeting.

He never came home.

The emergency records had listed a sudden cardiac event. My mother had been too overwhelmed to challenge the explanation, and the available records contained no test that could now settle our worst suspicion.

“So we may never know,” I said outside her room.

“We may never prove how he died,” Fuentes answered. “That’s different from ignoring what led up to it.”

I wanted certainty.

She refused to manufacture it.

A week earlier, that would have felt cruel.

Now I understood it was part of being honest.

Karina’s attorney contacted us again.

She had surrendered her phone and access to an account her father used to send her instructions.

Some messages had been deleted.

Others remained.

There were references to the box before our wedding.

To my mother’s habits.

To which documents she kept at home.

And one line from Jorge that made me grip the edge of the desk.

The boy trusts easily. Rodrigo was the same until someone got to him.

The boy.

I had been thirty when he first shook my hand.

He had still seen the child whose father never came back.

That afternoon, the court temporarily blocked any transfer based on the disputed agreement.

My lawyer called it an important step.

I called my mother.

“We stopped it.”

“For now,” she said.

“For now.”

For the first time in days, she laughed a little.

Then a nurse interrupted.

A man had arrived with paperwork claiming he was authorized to arrange her transfer to another facility.

My blood went cold.

“What man?”

She covered the phone.

I heard voices.

Then my mother returned.

“He won’t give the papers to the nurse.”

“Stay in your room.”

Through the receiver, I heard her door open.

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And Jorge’s voice.

“We need to end this.”