Not yet.
My legs were trembling, but my head had gone cold. I took Arturo’s cell phone before the paramedics arrived and slipped it into the pocket of my robe. I didn’t know why I did it. Maybe because a part of me already understood that, if that coffee had been meant for me, the truth was not going to come from his mouth.
Minutes later, I knocked on the patio door of my neighbor.
Don Rafael came out almost immediately. He was in his sixties, with a discreet belly and that look of a former judicial police officer that seemed to register even what one left unsaid. When he saw my face, he didn’t ask useless questions.
—What happened?
—Arturo poisoned himself —I said—. But the coffee was meant for me.
He didn’t contradict me. He didn’t tell me to calm down. He just came with me to the kitchen, saw the broken cup, the dark bottle next to the sugar, and the phone I had just placed on the table.
—Don’t touch anything else —he said—. Have you called the police?
I shook my head.
—I want to know the truth first.
He opened Arturo’s phone with the fingerprint left on the glass on the table. We found deleted messages, voice notes, transfers. What at first seemed like a cheap affair with a coworker began to look different. Daniela wasn’t sending him messages like a lover. She was sending him instructions.
“Your mother-in-law signed because she trusted me.”
“If Marina dies before Friday, the house goes through clean.”
“Don’t make me tell Teresa about your debts.”
I felt nauseous.
Teresa.
My mother-in-law.
The woman who had spent years telling me that that house, the one I inherited from my father in the Independencia neighborhood, would never “really” belong to an outsider like me. The same woman who pretended to bless me at Christmas and then criticized me even for how I cut tomatoes.
—This is more than infidelity —Don Rafael said quietly—. This is fraud, pressure… and fear.
—Fear of whom?
He didn’t get to answer. My phone rang.
It was the hospital.
Arturo was still alive.
They had stabilized him, but he was in serious condition.
I went with Don Rafael. In the emergency room, the smell of chlorine turned my stomach. We waited almost an hour until they let us see him for a few minutes. Arturo’s lips were dry, his skin ashen, and a monitor was marking his guilt with flashes of green light.
When he saw me, he tried to turn his face away.
—Look at me —I said.
His eyes filled with shame.
—I didn’t want to… —he murmured.
—But you did it.
He began to cry silently. I had never seen him like that. Never.
—Daniela isn’t my lover —he said, his voice rough—. She’s Sergio Barragán’s daughter.
That name chilled my blood.
