“So am I.” He glances toward the window where the city glows beyond the glass. “Right now I want you to recover. Tomorrow I want your husband nowhere near this floor.”
Ex-husband, you think, but the word feels flimsy now. Alejandro is not even gone twenty-four hours and already the idea of him belongs to another life, another version of you who still believed expensive betrayal had to look sophisticated.
“You knew who I was on that bus,” you say.
“I knew your last name.” Fernando slips a folded photograph from his coat pocket and sets it on the blanket. “That was enough.”
You look down.
It is an old picture, edges worn soft with time. A much younger Fernando, leaner, harder, maybe twenty, standing beside a man you recognize instantly from the slope of his shoulders and the kindness in his eyes. Your father.
Mateo Cruz.
The sight of him hits you so suddenly your breath catches. He has been dead seven years, and still grief can open like a trapdoor under the most ordinary second.
“Your father kept me out of prison when I was nineteen,” Fernando says. “I was poor, angry, and convenient to blame for a crime committed by someone much richer. Mateo Cruz was the only lawyer in that building who believed me.” He pauses. “I don’t forget debts.”
The room goes still around you.
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