She read the letter standing up because sitting down didn’t feel like something her body was going to agree to.
Her grandfather had written it in the careful, deliberate way of a man who had not been formally educated past eighth grade but had spent a lifetime writing things that needed to be understood correctly. He did not waste words.
Aitana, if you have this letter, then what I feared has happened. I need you to know the truth: you did not forge those documents. You did not steal anything. What was done to you was done deliberately, and it was done by people who share your blood.
She read that paragraph three times.
Not because she didn’t understand it the first time.
Because understanding it and absorbing it were different processes, and the second one was taking longer.
She kept reading.
Don Teodoro had noticed irregularities on the family’s communal property holdings — the several hundred acres outside Tucson that had been held in a family trust for two generations — approximately eight months before Aitana’s arrest. Land that appeared in records as sold, although no sale he had authorized had taken place. Documents with his signature that he had not signed. Documents with Aitana’s signature in transactions she had not conducted.
He had gone looking for the source.
What he found was a scheme that had been running for at least three years, organized around a single attorney — Benjamin Cardenas, the family’s longtime notary and legal representative — and operated with the participation of two people inside the family.
Aitana’s mother, Elvira.
And her brother Fausto.
Aitana sat down on the rock.
Not as a decision. As an outcome.
“He knew,” she said.
“He found out,” Jacinto said carefully. “There’s a difference. By the time he understood what he was looking at, they had already put the pieces in place against you.”
“He could have reported it.”
“He tried.”
“What stopped him?”
Jacinto was quiet for a moment.
“They scared him off,” he said. “I don’t know exactly how. But he was a seventy-three-year-old man with a bad heart, and they knew how to apply pressure without leaving marks. He died four months after your conviction. He never got to do what he planned.”
Aitana looked at the letter.
“He planned this,” she said. “He buried this here for me to find.”
“He made me promise to check on it,” Jacinto said. “Every few months, make sure it was still there, make sure nobody else had found it. He said if you ever came back and went looking, it meant you’d figured out enough to need the rest.”
“And if I never came back?”
Jacinto looked at the lamp.
“Then it would stay buried,” he said. “And he would have failed you. And he knew it.”
