Chapter 5: The Name She Didn't Expect Me to Know
Beatriz came back inside twenty minutes later.
Her posture had changed.
Shoulders back.
Chin level.
She had made her call and she had a plan and she wanted me to see that she had a plan.
"My attorney will be here tomorrow morning," she said.
"Until then, I have nothing further to say."
"Tomás Ferreira," I said.
The posture held for exactly one second.
Then her left hand moved to the counter and rested there, very lightly, as if she needed something solid beneath her palm.
"I don't know who that is," she said.
"The account in Lisbon," I said.
"The transfers.
Eight months of phone calls."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
Rodrigo placed the printed page on the counter in front of her.
She looked at it.
She didn't pick it up.
"This is speculation," she said.
"You've had someone run an illegal search on my private financial activity."
"Joint account," Rodrigo said.
"No legal barrier."
"I want that document removed from this house."
"It's a copy," Rodrigo said.
"The original is already filed."
Beatriz turned to me.
When she spoke, her voice had dropped to something quieter and more deliberate.
The performance was gone.
What replaced it was colder and more honest than anything she had shown me in four years of marriage.
"You think you understand what's been happening," she said.
"You don't."
"Then tell me."
"Tomás is my brother." She said it without blinking.
"My half-brother.
He needed money.
I helped him.
That is not a crjme."
"You moved four hundred and thirty thousand euros to your brother without telling me."
"I didn't think you'd understand."
"You're right," I said.
"I don't understand.
I also don't understand why a woman helping her brother felt the need to keep an eight-year-old too exhausted and too frightened to use a tablet and call her father."
The quiet stretched.
Lourdes was writing something in a small notebook of her own.
"She would have told you," Beatriz said.
"She tells you everything.
She always has.
I needed time."
"Time for what?"
She didn't answer.
"Time for what, Beatriz?"
"To fix it." Her voice was flat.
"Tomás made some bad decisions.
The money was supposed to come back.
It was always supposed to come back."
"And Isabella carrying garbage bags was part of fixing it."
"Isabella carrying garbage bags had nothing to do with the money." For the first time, something that might have been genuine emotion crossed her face.
Not remorse.
Closer to frustration.
"I don't like her.
I have never liked her.
She looks at me the way her mother used to look at people — like she already knows something you haven't figured out yet.
It irritates me.
That's all it was."
The kitchen was very quiet.
Rodrigo's pen had stopped moving.
Lourdes had stopped writing.
I had spent four years in a house with a woman who had just told me, in a flat and almost bored voice, that she had spent three months systematically breaking my daughter's spirit because the child's expression irritated her.
"Get out of my house," I said.
"This is my house too."
"Not tonight." I looked at Rodrigo.
"Mrs.
Vidal," Rodrigo said, "given the child welfare report that will be filed this evening and the financial irregularities already documented, I would strongly advise you to make alternative arrangements for tonight.
Voluntarily.
The alternative is a call to the Guardia Civil, which I am prepared to make in the next ten minutes."
Beatriz looked at me for a long moment.
Then she picked up her phone, her keys, and her cocktail glass — still half full — and walked toward the entrance hall.
At the doorway she stopped.
"She's not even yours," Beatriz said.
I looked at her.
"Biologically." Her voice was perfectly steady.
"I had a test done.
Eight months ago.
I wanted to know what I was dealing with."
The floor didn't move.
The lights didn't change.
Rodrigo was very still beside me.
"Camila never told you," Beatriz said.
"But I know.
And now you know I know."
She walked out.
The front door closed behind her.
I stood in the kitchen for a moment.
Then I sat down at the table.
The notebook was still there, yellow cover, bent corners, tape along the spine.
Rodrigo sat across from me.
He didn't say anything immediately.
He understood that some information needs a moment before it can be spoken around.
"Is it true?" he finally asked.
"I don't know," I said.
And then, because it was the only thing that actually mattered: "It doesn't change anything."
Rodrigo nodded slowly.
"It might change what she tries to do next," he said.
May you like
He was right.
And upstairs, my daughter was asleep, not knowing that the woman who had just walked out had been carrying a weapon she hadn't used until the very last moment.
