Your children.
A woman in a navy suit is waiting when the nurse wheels you back to your room.
She introduces herself as Lucía Herrera, Fernando’s chief of staff, and sets a leather folder on the side table with the kind of careful efficiency that suggests she has cleaned up men’s disasters for most of her adult life. Her expression is neither warm nor cold. It is professional in the way of someone who can schedule a board coup before lunch and still send flowers to a funeral by noon.
“Mr. Castillo asked me to bring these,” she says.
Inside the folder are your hospital admission papers, a temporary bank card with your name on it, and printed copies of the divorce agreement Alejandro forced you to sign. But now there are yellow tabs along the margins, red underlines marking clauses you never noticed through your tears and shame and shock.
“There are irregularities,” Lucía says. “Undisclosed asset transfers. Coercive timing. Language designed to strip you of marital protections before the children were born.”
You look up. “Why is he doing this?”
Lucía’s mouth shifts, just slightly. “Mr. Castillo is not a man who likes certain kinds of cruelty.”
That is not an answer.
It is also the only one you are getting for now.
Fernando comes in after sunset.
He doesn’t knock. Men like him probably never have to, but somehow his arrival still doesn’t feel rude. He enters the room with the quiet force of a storm that has learned how to wear a tailored coat. The nurses outside notice, straighten, and suddenly find urgent reasons to be somewhere else.
He stops beside your bed and studies you like he’s confirming a calculation turned out correctly.
“You and the babies are alive,” he says. “Good.”
You should thank him. That is the polite thing, the sane thing, the thing any woman who woke up in a luxury hospital paid for by one of the most powerful men in the country would say. Instead you ask, “What do you want?”
One corner of his mouth moves, not quite a smile. “A less stupid question.”
“I’m serious.”
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