Chapter 6 CHAPTER 6

Alejandro’s POV.

I had been staring at the same paragraph of the contract for twenty minutes when my assistant knocked twice and opened the door without waiting for an answer.

“Sir, Miss Catalina is outside. She says it’s urgent.”

“Is she bleeding?”

“No, sir.”

“Then it isn’t urgent.”

Serrano stayed in the doorway with the face of a man who has been with me six years and knows I give in sometimes.

“She’s crying. And there are two clients in reception.”

I closed the contract.

Catalina came in before he finished opening the door, her eyes swollen and her mascara smudged just enough to be noticed, not enough to ruin her face. She was holding her purse against her chest and her left cheek was covered by her hair.

“Cousin…” Her voice broke on the first syllable, right on schedule. “I’m sorry for coming like this.”

“Sit down.”

“I can’t, I’m shaking.” She didn’t sit down, and she wasn’t shaking either. “Your wife assaulted me.”

I set my pen on the desk.

“Explain that to me.”

“I was at the mall, I saw her and I went over to say hello like any normal person. I asked if she needed help with her bags and she came at me.” She pushed her hair back and turned her face toward the window light. “Look at me.”

Her cheek was marked in red, wide, from an open hand. Somebody had hit her with conviction and without much practice.

I thought about the woman who that morning poured my coffee until it spilled over Margarita’s skirt with a steadier hand than my accountant’s, and I had to drop my eyes to the desk for a second.

“And what did you do to her?”

“Me?” She opened her eyes as if I had asked her to pick up the check. “Nothing, Alejandro. I told her she looked different and she went crazy. That woman hasn’t been right in the head since the fall. She never used to raise her voice, and now she’s out spending your money and insulting my aunt.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Thank God my uncle showed up.” She lowered her voice and tipped her chin in that gesture she learned from Margarita. “He did put her in her place.”

The pencil between my fingers snapped with a dry crack.

“Say that again.”

“That my uncle corrected her, the way it should be done.” She shrugged. “He gave her a couple of slaps and told her to take that outfit off. She answered him back, can you imagine, and he shoved her on the stairs and—”

“He shoved her where?”

Catalina stopped. It was only an instant, but at last something real showed in her face: she had just realized she’d said too much.

“She grabbed the banister, nothing happened to her,” she said quickly. “You know how my uncle is, cousin, he’s not a man who holds back. That’s why I came, because I’m afraid of what could happen.” She came up to the desk and put her hands on the edge. “Talk to your wife. Tell her to calm down, to go back to being the way she was, not to provoke anyone. I don’t want something worse happening to her and all of us having to regret it.”

There it was.

Tell her to calm down and go back to being the way she was. And if she doesn’t calm down, whatever happens to her next has already been announced from my own office, by a girl with a mark on her face and two witnesses in reception.

Some people threaten by raising their voice. My stepmother’s family threatens by crying.

“You’re right,” I said.

Catalina blinked.

“I am?”

“In a house where people fall down the stairs, we should all be afraid.”

She didn’t know what to do with that sentence, so she did the only thing she knows how to do: she put on her little-girl face.

I opened the drawer, took out the checkbook and signed without looking at her.

“For your face. And for whatever else you feel like.”

Catalina leaned across the desk, took the check and didn’t even pretend to read it slowly. She put it in her purse, and the tremor she’d walked in with was cured on the spot.

“You’re the only one who understands me, cousin.” She came around the desk and kissed my cheek, leaving her perfume on me like a signature. “I only want what’s best for this family.”

“I know exactly what you want.”

She laughed, satisfied, because in her head that was a compliment, and walked out with her heels clicking and the purse on her arm.

The moment the door closed I got up and went to the window.

Four floors down the city was moving along, unaware of any of it. I stood there looking at the glass with my hands in my pockets, squeezing and releasing what was left of the pencil, my jaw so tight the pain climbed to my temple.

Two slaps and a shove on that staircase. And me up here, going over clauses.

I gave that woman my name so that man could never put a hand on her again, and the old bastard walked into my house, poured himself my whiskey and did it in front of my stepmother. Knowing I wasn’t there. That kind of thing is done when the husband isn’t there.

And neither of them called me. Catalina had to come and tell me with her cheek red and her hand out, to see how much I’d pay for the news.

Serrano knocked again.

“Sir, I have the registry information.”

“Come in.”

He came in with an envelope and opened it on the desk.

“We confirmed it, sir. The will exists. It’s registered with the notary in the capital, dated the same year the mother died, and it was never modified.”

I sat down and went through the pages. It was all there, written in that cold language notaries use to name the things people kill each other over.

The fortune never belonged to Juliana’s father. It was her mother’s. Land, two buildings downtown and the block of shares in the company that man brags about as his own at every dinner. All of it came into the marriage with her, and she signed it over to her daughter before she died.

To her daughter. On that paper there is only one.

“The father is listed as administrator,” Serrano said. “Nothing more than administrator. And there’s a clause.”

“Read it.”

“The administration ends when the heiress reaches the age of majority and requests it in writing, or when she marries.” Serrano looked up. “Sir, that woman is already married to you.”

I closed the folder and left my hand on top of it.

Now I understand why they handed her over without fighting a single line of the contract. Now I understand why they raised her with no money of her own and no phone that worked, with her head down and those old-woman clothes. A woman who doesn’t know what she has never asks for it.

And from one day to the next, my wife got up out of a hospital bed as someone who would ask for it.

“Shall I notify the notary, sir?”

“Not yet.” I put the envelope in the drawer and turned the key. “And this doesn’t leave this office, Serrano. Not a word in my house.”

He left. I sat there with the key in my hand, looking at the desk.

My wife is worth more dead than alive, and she’s the only one in that house who doesn’t know it.