Chapter 9 - The First LieJavier had proposed beneath the orange trees in my mother's courtyard. I remembered him crying as he slipped the ring over my finger. Now I wondered how much of that evening had been true.

Paula met us in Lucía's office. Her own lawyer accompanied her. She handed over the original audio file and the phone that held it, so the circumstances of the recording could be assessed properly. Nobody pretended it was a magic answer to every question.

In the recording, silverware clinked. Sergio talked about cash flow. Javier asked how long the bank would take to release funds. Then Mercedes spoke.

“Morales thinks his daughter married for love,” she said. “He never understood that keeping her close was the best way to keep his questions quiet.”

My chest went cold.

Javier replied, “Don't bring Clara's father into this.”

“Your father brought him into it twenty years ago.”

The recording ended in the scrape of a chair.

I played it twice, then told Lucía to stop. My father had never spoken badly about Javier's family. He hadn't known them well before I brought Javier home. But once, the summer after our wedding, Dad had asked me whether my husband had ever mentioned a building project near Alcalá.

I had said no. Dad had looked relieved. I hadn't thought of that moment again until now.

At my mother's house, we opened the old locked drawer in Dad's desk. He had kept records from his hardware business, copies of invoices, and newspaper clippings about a warehouse renovation twenty years earlier. The main contractor had been a company once controlled by Javier's father, Eduardo Rivas.

One article described a fire that destroyed part of the site. No deaths, but several workers had lost tools and months of wages after subcontractors stopped answering calls.

Dad had underlined a single name: Sergio Valdés.

“He was there?” I asked.

Mom nodded. “Your father believed someone was charging for materials that never reached the job site.”

“Did he report it?”

“He tried. Then Eduardo died, the company closed, and Dad said he couldn't prove enough.”

Inside a folder labeled KEEP, we found an old photograph. Dad stood outside the ruined warehouse with Eduardo Rivas and a younger Mercedes.

On the back, in Dad's handwriting, were four words:

Ask Mercedes about Mateo.

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