Part Four: Rodrigo Salazar
Santiago had told me once, early in Mateo’s illness, when we were still trying to plan for contingencies we hoped would remain hypothetical: If anything happens, call Rodrigo Salazar first. He knows exactly what I wanted for Mateo. Don’t make any decisions without him.
I called him from the car.
He met me at his office that afternoon — a man in his fifties with reading glasses on a chain and the specific manner of a lawyer who had seen enough of human behavior to be unsurprised by most of it but had not become indifferent.
He reviewed the documents I had photographed while still at my parents’ table. His expression as he read was not dramatic. It was the controlled expression of someone processing information and arriving at a professional assessment.
“The trust is protected,” he said. “Santiago structured it very carefully. There is no mechanism by which any of these people can access it without your consent or a court order establishing incapacity.”
“They’re going to try to establish incapacity.”
“Yes.” He set the papers down. “That’s what the psychological evaluation form is for. They’ll argue that your grief has rendered you unable to act in your own interests.” He looked at me over his glasses. “But they need evidence. And they need it to be credible.”
He opened a drawer and produced a file.
“I should also tell you that your parents and sister have called this office four times in the past year. Inquiring about the trust’s beneficiaries. Its terms. Whether there were mechanisms for changing administrators.”
I looked at the file.
“They started before Mateo died.”
“They started eight months before.” He held my gaze. “This was not a decision they made in response to your son’s death. The death was the trigger for executing a plan they had been constructing throughout his illness.”
I sat with this.
Eight months. He had been sick for eight months. They had been planning for eight months. While I was sleeping in hospital chairs and learning to cook foods his damaged system could tolerate and memorizing medication schedules and telling him stories about superheroes while he was too exhausted to do anything but listen — they had been on the phone with my lawyer’s office asking about beneficiary terms.
“What do I do?” I said.
“We document everything,” he said. “And we let them make their move. Because when they move, they’re going to leave a record.”
