Chapter 4 CHAPTER 4

Julia’s POV.

“A maid was mopping the hallway and I didn’t want to step on her wet floor,” I said, without looking away from her eyes. “She’s gone now.”

Margarita looked at the dry hallway behind me and her smile stretched half an inch wider.

“How considerate.” She slipped the phone into the pocket of her clean skirt. “Get some rest, my girl. With a blow like that, a person starts hearing things that aren’t there.”

She shut the door in my face.

I stood in front of the wood for a second, my pulse beating in my throat and her sentence going around in my head: if she starts remembering, I’ll take care of it myself.

I went downstairs, called a taxi from the gatehouse and didn’t breathe easy until the gate shut behind the car.

Out on the avenue I dialed the nursing home. The nurse I had hired picked up, the one who talks like she’s reading off a grocery list.

“Stable, ma’am. Her temperature went up last night, but it came down with medication.”

“And if she wakes up?”

“We tell her calmly that she’s safe, the way you instructed.” A pause. “Ma’am, the neurologist says that in these cases there’s no way to know if it’s days or months.”

I hung up squeezing the phone and made myself let the air out slowly, because my sister didn’t have months. Those people had only needed two days between the wedding and the staircase.

The mall met me with cold air and elevator music, and for the first time in three days I felt like I was on familiar ground, because inside a store I know exactly who I am.

The saleswoman at the first boutique brought me a sleeveless dress, gorgeous, the kind I would have worn to close a deal.

“No. Long sleeves,” I said. “Everything with long sleeves.”

“But it’s hot out, ma’am.”

“Long sleeves, down to the wrist.”

She carried four things into the fitting room and I shut myself in with them. And there, in front of the mirror, in my underwear, with the light falling on me from above, I looked at my arms.

They were smooth and firm, without a single mark.

I raised my hands and looked at my knuckles, those perfect knuckles of a woman who only ever hurts herself typing, and I remembered the white lines crossing my sister’s, old and thick, one on top of another.

I sat down on the fitting room bench with the dress in my lap and covered my face with both hands. I cried doubled over, biting the inside of my lip so I wouldn’t make noise, because outside there was a saleswoman waiting and inside there was me, understanding that somebody had written my sister’s whole life onto her skin while I was being paid for piano lessons.

I washed my face at the little sink, put myself back together with what I had in my purse and came out with my chin up.

“I’ll take these four,” I told the saleswoman. “And I need shoes, a structured blazer and everything you’ve got with long sleeves and a good drape.”

Afterward, at the mall pharmacy, I bought concealer, a palette of purple tones and a white brow pencil. If I ever had to show an arm, I was going to have whatever scars I needed.

I was in front of the mirror at the shoe store, trying on a pair of black heels, when I saw her reflected behind me.

Catalina came over with two shopping bags on her arm and the face of somebody who just found exactly what she came out looking for.

“Well, look at this.” She stopped at my back. “The poor sick woman, spending Alejandro’s money.”

“Did you follow me?”

“My aunt asked me to look after you.” She picked up a shoe off the display and dropped it. “And I know exactly how much you’ve spent, because the alerts on that card go to her phone too.”

I filed that where I keep the important numbers.

“Then tell your aunt I’m just getting started.”

Catalina lowered her voice until the saleswoman couldn’t hear us.

“Who do you think you are? You ate in the kitchen and thanked me for my old clothes. I got the big bedroom, the car and my cousin, and you got what was left over, which was the last name and the staircase.”

My stomach closed up, and not from fear.

“And still, a woman who eats in the kitchen is the one keeping you up at night,” I said. “That says a lot about you, cousin.”

She grabbed my wrist with both hands and yanked the sleeve up.

“Let me see those martyr arms you’re always showing Alejandro so he’ll pity you.”

My breath stopped. The fabric went past my elbow before I could react, and I pulled so hard I tore her hand off me and she staggered on her heels.

Catalina straightened up with her face twisted and slapped me across the face.

The sound bounced off the mirrors of the shoe store. My cheek burned, my ear rang, and the saleswoman stood there with a box half open in her hands.

I breathed once. Then I slapped her back with an open hand, my whole shoulder behind it, and Catalina’s head snapped sideways.

“That one was mine,” I told her, quietly. “The next one I collect with lawyers and with the cameras in this store, which already recorded both of us. Your call.”

Catalina put her hand to her red cheek and took a step back, looking at me like she was really seeing me for the first time.

“You’re not Juliana,” she said.

“I’m what’s left after you people finished off Juliana.”

She left almost at a run, the bags banging against her legs, and I stood there in the middle of the shoe store with the heels on and my cheek burning, while the saleswoman pretended to organize boxes.

“I’ll take these,” I said. “I’m wearing them.”

I walked out of that mall in red, in a long-sleeved dress fitted to the knee, my hair loose, my lips the same color as the dress and my bags carried out to the taxi by two employees. The woman coming back at me from the storefront windows had nothing to do with the one in the photo behind the vase.

When the taxi crossed the mansion gate, I pulled my left sleeve down to my wrist and opened the door before anyone could come down to open it for me.

I walked into the entrance hall with my heels echoing off the marble, and the murmur in the living room cut off.

Margarita was standing beside the big armchair, her back very straight. Catalina, sitting on the arm of the sofa with an ice pack on her cheek, got to her feet. The maid crossing with a tray stopped in the middle of the room.

And in the main chair, the high-backed one, with his legs crossed and a glass of whiskey in his hand in the middle of the afternoon, was a man I had never seen in my life.

Dark suit, gray at the temples, a gold ring on his finger. He was sitting there as if that house and everything in it belonged to him, including the woman who had just walked through the door.

“Look who’s here,” Margarita said, with poisoned sweetness. “Juliana, your father came to see you.”

The floor moved under my heels.

A father. My whole life believing I had no blood left anywhere, and the man who let me go was drinking whiskey in the living room of the house where my sister nearly died.

He looked me over, slowly, from the shoes to the hair, the way you inspect merchandise that came back damaged. He set the glass down on the table, stood up and walked toward me until he was close enough that I had to lift my chin.

“You look different,” he said, and took my chin between two fingers, turning my face toward the light. “Just like your mother when she got it into her head to disobey me.”