Her voice was measured. Calm. The voice of a woman who had thought about what she was going to say before she said it.
“Aitana has always been the complication,” she said. “Your father loved her in a way that made everything harder. The land, the trust, all of it. As long as she’s able to operate freely, none of this resolves cleanly.”
Fausto was quiet for a moment. “How long are we looking at?”
“With what we’ve built,” Benjamin said, “the DA’s office will take it. Fraud, embezzlement, forgery. We’re talking years.”
“And if she talks?” Fausto asked.
“She’ll talk,” Elvira said, “and nobody will listen. By the time she tries to build any kind of defense, we’ll have completed the transfers. There won’t be anything left to point to.”
Benjamin picked up a pen.
He slid documents across the desk.
Fausto signed.
Elvira signed.
Then Benjamin poured three glasses of something from a bottle on the credenza and they raised them, the way people raise glasses when they have concluded an agreement they’re satisfied with.
As if they hadn’t just decided to send her daughter to prison.
Aitana realized she was crying only because the screen had blurred.
She wasn’t making any sound.
The tears were simply moving down her face with the quiet efficiency of something that had been waiting a very long time for the right occasion.
She closed the laptop.
The Silence After the Video Was the Kind That Doesn’t Need to Be Filled
Jacinto sat on the far side of the cellar and said nothing.
He had seen the video before — she understood that without asking. He had watched it enough times to know what was coming before it came, which was possibly worse than watching it once in shock. He had been carrying the weight of knowing what was on that drive for eleven years, which was a different kind of sentence than the one Aitana had served, but a sentence nonetheless.
She should have hated him.
She had spent parts of the last eleven years constructing a working list of people toward whom she was permitted to direct her anger, and Jacinto had occupied a small but nonzero position on that list for the past several hours. He had known. He had stayed quiet. He had watched her get convicted of crimes she had not committed, watched her grandfather die of a broken heart in the months after the trial, and had continued coming up this hill to check on a buried box as if maintaining evidence were the same thing as doing something with it.
“They threatened your daughter,” she said.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Specifically,” he said. “Not vaguely. Specifically.”
She looked at the notebook on the rock beside her.
“I’m not going to tell you I forgive you,” she said. “I’m not there.”
“I’m not asking you to be.”
“But I’m also not going to sit here and hate you when I have more important things to do.”
He looked at her.
