Carmela Vega, the director of the home, was a 70-year-old woman with wrinkled hands and eyes that had seen too much childhood suffering.
He received Dolores in his office with distrust.
I don’t know what you’re trying to do, ma’am. The girl is under protection.
“You can’t have unauthorized visitors. I just want to talk to you,” Dolores said about Salomé, about how she got here. Carmela was silent for a moment, assessing the woman in front of her.
Something about Dolores inspired confidence in him. Perhaps it was her age, perhaps the weary gaze of someone who had fought many battles.
“The girl arrived 6 months ago,” Carmela began. Her uncle Gonzalo brought her. He said he couldn’t take care of her anymore, that his business didn’t allow it.
But there was something strange. Strange. How so? The girl had marks, ma’am, bruises on her arms that no one wanted to explain, and since she arrived she hardly speaks.
She eats little, sleeps even less, has nightmares every night; Dolores felt a chill.
And after the meeting with her father, has she seen her? Carmela lowered her gaze. Since returning from prison, Salomé hasn’t uttered a single word.
The doctors say there’s nothing physical wrong. It’s as if something has closed up inside her, as if she’s said everything she needed to say and now she’s silent forever.
Dolores looked towards the window, where a blonde girl was playing alone in the yard.
What did Carmela say to her father? Does anyone know? No one. But whatever it was, it’s destroying that girl from the inside out.
Five years earlier, on the night that changed everything, the Fuentes house was silent. Sara had put Salomé to bed early, as she did every night.
The 3-year-old girl was sleeping, hugging her teddy bear, oblivious to the hell that was about to break loose.
In the room, Ramiro Fuentes was drinking his fourth glass of whiskey.
He had lost his job that week. The carpentry shop where he had worked for 20 years closed without warning. At his age, he didn’t know how to start over.
Sara was on the phone in the kitchen. Her voice was a furious whisper. “I told you not to contact me anymore. What you did is unforgivable. If you don’t fix this, I’m going to talk.”
I don’t care what you threaten me with. She hung up violently and saw Ramiro watching her from the doorway.
Who were you talking to? Nobody. Go to sleep. You’ve had enough to drink. Ramiro wanted to ask more, but the alcohol was already clouding his thoughts.
He slumped down on the living room sofa and closed his eyes. Within minutes he was fast asleep.
What happened next, Ramiro wouldn’t remember, but someone else would. Salomé woke up to the sound of a door. She got out of bed and walked toward the hallway.
From the shadows she saw something that her 3-year-old eyes could not comprehend, but that her memory would keep forever.
A figure entered the house. A man the girl knew well. A man who always wore blue shirts and brought her sweets when he visited. Sara screamed, then there was silence.
Little Salome hid in the hallway closet, trembling, as the man in the blue shirt walked towards where her father slept.
Dolores spent the entire night reviewing the Fuentes case file.
Hundreds of pages, photographs he preferred not to remember, testimonies, expert reports, everything pointed to Ramiro, his fingerprints, his clothes, his lack of a solid alibi, but there were cracks, small, almost invisible, but they were there.
The first witness, a neighbor named Pedro Sánchez, initially stated that he saw a man leaving the house at 11 pm.
Three days later, in a second statement, he specified that he was Ramiro. Why the change? Who pressured him? The physical evidence was processed in record time.
Forensic analyses typically took weeks. In this case, the results came back in 72 hours, just in time for the arrest.
The prosecutor in charge of the case was Aurelio Sánchez.
The surname matched that of the neighbor who witnessed the incident. Coincidence or family connection? Dolores looked for information about Aurelio Sánchez.
What she found deeply disturbed her. Aurelio was no longer a prosecutor. He had been promoted to judge three years earlier, just after securing Ramiro’s conviction.
His career took off thanks to this case, which he solved with exemplary efficiency, according to the newspapers of the time. But there was more.
Leave a Comment