Chapter 12 - The Angle Nobody SawI didn't click the attachment. Inés and I forwarded the email to Lucía, who arranged a safer way to examine it and preserve the original message. The sender asked for money in exchange for footage, and we didn't reward that demand.

A day later, the restaurant confirmed that one of its guests had filmed part of the confrontation. Álvaro was upset. “We can't control every phone in the room,” he said, “but we can give the police our own records.”

He offered a written statement about what staff had witnessed. One server remembered Mercedes signaling Javier just before the check arrived.

“Like she wanted him to perform?” I asked.

The server shifted uneasily. “I can't tell you what she wanted. I only saw the gesture.”

Fair enough. For the first time in weeks, I preferred the plain truth to a dramatic guess.

Lucía advised me to avoid fighting the gossip online while legal facts were still being established. But the post was spreading, and my employees were being tagged. We issued one short public statement: an incident had occurred, we had reported it, and Morales Studio remained open for business. No insults. No accusations beyond what I could personally confirm.

That night, Javier appeared at my hotel's reception desk with roses. I refused to come down. He left a voice message.

“I miss you,” he said. “I know I handled dinner badly. Mom's losing the house. You don't understand the pressure. If you come home, we can fix this.”

I listened once. In the background, Mercedes said, “Tell her about the apartment.”

He stopped recording.

I called the real estate agent who had handled our apartment purchase. The deed was in both our names, with a mortgage we were both liable for. Javier couldn't simply trade me his half as though it were a watch he didn't wear.

I asked Lucía to obtain the relevant records. What came back shocked us: Javier had recently begun an application to refinance the apartment, using an estimate far higher than its market value. The bank had requested additional proof of income.

I thought I'd found the last hidden debt. Then our accountant found a monthly payment from our joint household account to a property management company.

It covered the rent for an apartment I had never seen.

The tenant's name was Sofia Valdés.

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