PART 4
He wasn’t promising her romance.
He was promising her stolen equity.
By eight the next morning, I was sitting in Elena’s office wearing the same clothes I had worn on the canceled flight.
Laura arrived carrying her laptop and two folders.
At 8:37, Elena’s phone rang.
It was the notary’s office.
She put the call on speaker.
The document supposedly granting Mauricio authority contained an authentic-looking seal and a legitimate notarial identification number.
But the number belonged to something else entirely.
A document prepared years earlier for an unrelated client.
The notary had never met me.
He had never prepared any power of attorney for Mauricio.
He had never authorized the document sitting on my laptop.
Someone had constructed it using pieces of genuine paperwork.
Elena looked at me across the desk.
“That’s good news for the house.”
I laughed once.
It didn’t sound like laughter.
“Someone forged a legal document with my signature.”
“I didn’t say it was good news overall.”
Laura turned her computer toward me.
“There’s more.”
I almost didn’t want to look.
She had traced the company receiving the payments.
Vela Azul Media had been created eight months earlier.
The listed administrator was Camila’s cousin.
Its registered address was a tiny office suite that housed dozens of businesses.
The first payment from our company arrived eleven days after Mauricio began following Camila publicly online.
The second arrived two weeks later.
Then another.
Then another.
Mauricio had approved all of them.
Renata had processed six.
I stared at my sister’s name until the letters blurred.
I could almost understand a cheating husband lying to me.
I could almost understand a selfish woman accepting expensive gifts from a married man.
But Renata?
I had sat beside her bed when she had pneumonia at nineteen.
I had paid the tuition installment she was too afraid to tell Mom she had missed.
After Mom died, I was the one who called her every Sunday because she said the silence in her apartment frightened her.
And she had been helping my husband manufacture paperwork to take our mother’s house.
At 9:12, my phone buzzed.
Unknown number.
The message contained one sentence.
I THINK YOUR SISTER LIED TO BOTH OF US.
A photograph arrived immediately afterward.
Camila.
She was standing in the San Ángel kitchen.
But the photograph wasn’t from social media.
Behind her, sitting at the kitchen table, was Renata.
In front of Renata was a stack of old documents.
My documents.
And beside them was the wooden box I had taken from Mom’s desk after her funeral.
I stood so quickly my chair rolled backward.
Elena grabbed my phone.
“Who sent this?”
Another message appeared.
IT’S CAMILA. PLEASE DON’T BLOCK ME. I DIDN’T KNOW THE HOUSE WAS YOURS.
I laughed bitterly.
“You wore my necklace.”
Three dots appeared.
Then:
I DIDN’T KNOW THAT WAS YOURS EITHER.
I wanted to throw the phone across the room.
Instead, Elena said, “Answer her.”
“No.”
“Not emotionally.”
She slid a legal pad toward me.
“Ask her what she knows.”
My fingers shook as I typed.
Why was Renata going through my mother’s documents?
Camila answered within seconds.
BECAUSE MAURICIO SAID HE NEEDED YOUR OLD SIGNATURES.
My entire body went cold.
Then another message came.
HE SAID YOU TWO WERE ALREADY SEPARATED AND YOU HAD AGREED TO TRANSFER YOUR INTEREST IN SOME PROPERTY. RENATA SAID IT WAS TRUE.
Another.
SHE SAID YOU WERE THE ONE MAKING THINGS DIFFICULT.
I looked at Elena.
She said nothing.
Camila sent eleven screenshots.
They were from a group chat.
Mauricio.
Renata.
Camila.
The group had originally been called CASA AZUL.
Then Mauricio had renamed it FUTURO.
The first messages were about paint colors and furniture.
Then came the ones that mattered.
Mauricio:
Don’t post the exterior until the paperwork is finished.
Renata:
She never checks the old archive. I found everything.
Mauricio:
Signature?
Renata:
Working on it.
My hands started trembling.
Then I saw a message from Camila.
What if she finds out?
Mauricio had answered:
By the time she does, it won’t matter.
I stopped scrolling.
For several seconds, nobody in Elena’s office spoke.
Then Laura whispered, “Oh my God.”
Camila called.
I nearly rejected it.
Elena shook her head.
I answered.
“What?”
Camila sounded nothing like the woman laughing in my mother’s living room the night before.
She sounded terrified.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t.”
“I know that doesn’t mean anything.”
“You were sleeping with my husband.”
“He told me you were separated.”
“And you believed my sister was helping him move his girlfriend into my mother’s house?”
Silence.
“I believed what I wanted to believe,” she said finally.
That answer was the first honest thing I had heard from any of them.
She continued.
“Mauricio told me the house had been his investment but was still registered through an old family arrangement. Renata told me you had another property and didn’t care about San Ángel.”
“My mother died in that house.”
