Chapter 2: The Tablet With the Cracked Screen
Sofia's lips were still moving.
Mateo pressed closer.
"She kjlled who, baby?
Tell Daddy."
But Sofia's eyes had drifted — not to her father's face, not to Dolores frozen in the doorway — but to Renata.
And whatever she saw there made the words stop completely, like a door swinging shut from the inside.
Renata hadn't moved.
She was watching the child the way someone watches a match held too close to something flammable.
Still.
Controlled.
But her right hand — the one hanging at her side — had curled into a fist so tight her knuckles had gone pale.
Dolores saw it.
"Señor Mateo." Her voice was barely above a whisper.
"This is not the first time.
Last Tuesday — when you were in the city — Sofia wouldn't eat.
She sat at the table for two hours.
I found her hiding in the linen closet afterward.
She told me—" Dolores stopped, glanced once at Renata, then back at him.
"She told me she wasn't allowed to tell."
The room seemed to contract around that sentence.
Mateo stood slowly.
When he turned to face Renata, something in his expression had changed — not loud, not explosive, but final in a way that was almost worse.
"How long?" he said.
Renata opened her mouth.
May you like
And that was when Sofia tugged her father's sleeve and held up something small — a tablet, cracked at one corner, that she had been clutching inside her sweater the entire time.
The screen was still on.
