Chapter 14 - The Hospital NightMy father died after a sudden heart attack. He had been seventy-one, stubborn about checkups, and still lifting boxes at the store when he should have been retired. The hospital records showed emergency treatment and the time he arrived. Nothing in them pointed to foul play, and I wasn't going to manufacture a mystery around his death because I had discovered lies elsewhere.

But Sofia's words haunted me. What had happened before the ambulance came?

My mother remembered Dad receiving a call the afternoon he collapsed. He'd left the house to meet someone in town and returned pale, angry, and exhausted.

“He said the past had found us,” she recalled. “I asked what he meant, and he told me not to worry.”

“Did Javier know he was ill?”

“He came to the hospital. He was there when the doctor talked to us.”

I remembered Javier holding my hand in the waiting room, a gesture I'd treasured for years. Perhaps he'd comforted me and hidden something at the same time. Both could be true. That realization hurt more than a simple villain would have.

Mateo agreed to speak with Lucía again. He said Mercedes had met my father shortly before the heart attack, asking him to surrender his old warehouse records. Mateo had learned this afterward, from a frightened former bookkeeper. It was secondhand information, he emphasized. We needed the bookkeeper herself.

Her name was Carmen Lozano. She lived quietly on the outskirts of Madrid and had ignored inquiries for years. When Lucía reached her, Carmen initially refused.

“I've buried this already,” she said.

“I understand,” Lucía replied. “But someone may be using the same methods to harm another business.”

Carmen agreed to review the documents with her own adviser.

Two days later she arrived carrying a battered red binder. She opened it on Lucía's table. Inside were invoice copies, dated notes, and a handwritten account of a meeting between Mercedes and Andrés Morales.

“He found the false invoices,” Carmen said. “And he knew the money hadn't gone where it was supposed to.”

“Was he threatened?” I asked.

Carmen paused. “Yes. But that isn't what I've kept secret.”

She turned a page and showed me a bank receipt bearing my father's name.

“He accepted a payment,” she said. “Your father took their money.”

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