Chapter 7 - What My Father LeftMy father had died five years earlier. He'd run a modest hardware store and believed a handwritten receipt was a promise between people. When I launched Morales Studio, he lent me €12,000 from his savings and refused interest.

“Give it to someone else when you can,” he told me.

He left behind letters written on lined paper, often with the spelling crossed out and corrected. I read them when the world felt too loud. Javier knew that.

At the apartment, the superintendent showed me the corridor-camera record he was authorized to share about entry times. Javier had arrived with Mercedes. They'd carried away two boxes. I documented what I could and gave the information to Lucía rather than confronting them alone.

My mother, Elena, lived outside Toledo. When I called, she could tell from my first hello that something was wrong.

“Did he hurt you?” she asked.

“He threw wine at me.”

The silence that followed scared me more than her anger.

“I should have said something at Christmas,” she whispered.

“What did you see?”

“Javier wanted your father’s old paperwork. He asked whether the loan your dad gave you made him part owner of the company.”

“That's ridiculous.”

“I told him so.”

She hesitated. “Then Mercedes asked whether your father had left any signed blank pages.”

My heart began to race. Dad had kept blank stationery with his signature printed along the bottom, a habit from the store's early days. I had put the unused pages in the same storage box as his letters.

“Mom, why didn't you tell me?”

“You had just told me you were trying to save your marriage. I thought I was helping by keeping quiet.”

I wanted to blame her. Then I remembered every time I'd called her and said Javier was only stressed, Mercedes was only old-fashioned, I was only tired.

“You couldn't have known,” I said. “But now I need everything you remember.”

At the office, Inés checked archived company mail and found an inquiry sent three weeks earlier from a lender we didn't recognize. The message asked whether Morales Studio had inherited intellectual property and receivables from my father's hardware business.

That made no commercial sense. My father sold door hinges, not design services.

Attached was a draft agreement claiming Dad had assigned future family business rights to Javier Rivas.

At the bottom sat my father's signature—on a sheet of paper dated two years after his death.

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