Lucía interrupts. “Don’t. You’re worse when you moralize.”
The hospital board eventually opens an internal review into historical record suppression. It won’t resurrect justice for everyone. Institutions rarely repent with the thoroughness individuals deserve. But it is something. A crack. A light. A start.
Álvaro is arrested in November.
He arrives at the courthouse in a navy blazer and expensive sunglasses, looking exactly like the kind of man who has spent a lifetime believing money can subcontract consequences. The cameras love him for a day. Then the witness statements, archived payments, and attempted murder link make him look less like a patriarch and more like a coward who outsourced every dirty task from infancy onward.
He asks to speak to you once.
You refuse.
Then, after three sleepless nights, you change your mind.
Not because he deserves closure. Because you want to see whether evil looks any different when it has aged.
The meeting takes place in a legal interview room with a glass partition and a guard nearby. Álvaro sits already when you enter, hands folded, hair gone thin and white, jowls softened by years of rich food and lack of resistance. He studies your face the second you walk in, and something like wonder flickers there.
You hate it instantly.
“You look like her,” he says.
“Don’t.”
He leans back, wounded by your tone in the way men of his type always are, as though other people’s refusal to comfort them is the real violence in the room.
“I made mistakes,” he says.
You almost laugh.
“Mistakes are forgetting anniversaries,” you reply. “You trafficked a newborn.”
His expression hardens at the word.
“There are nuances you don’t understand.”
“There usually are when cowards need language.”
That lands. Good.
