Part Six: The Door
That night, the camera at my front door sent an alert to my phone at eleven forty-seven.
Valeria. Standing at my door, leaning close to the intercom.
I activated the recording app. I left the chain on the door.
“What do you want?” I said through the gap.
She had rearranged her face into something softer than what I had seen at the café. It was the face she used for persuasion — the one that was meant to read as sincerity.
“I want to give you one more chance to be reasonable,” she said. “If you agree to let me manage the trust, we’ll drop everything. No court, no guardianship. We’ll leave you alone.”
“And if I don’t?”
She let the soft face rest.
“You know what we have. Karla’s statements. Mom’s account of your behavior during the illness. The night you screamed at the hospital because they wouldn’t change his medication. The times you forgot to eat for two days. The calls you made at three in the morning, completely out of control.” She said it evenly, clinically. “A judge will hear all of that. A judge will see a woman who spent eight months falling apart and now can’t be trusted with her dead child’s money.”
I looked at her through the gap in the door.
I thought about the night I screamed at the hospital. I had screamed because a doctor had changed Mateo’s medication protocol without consulting me, and the new protocol was making him sicker, and I had been awake for thirty-one hours, and screaming had been the only thing that produced immediate attention. I would scream again. I would scream every time, if that was what it required.
I thought about the calls at three in the morning. I had called Karla because she had said call me whenever you need to, I mean it, any time. I had believed her. She had answered. She had not said anything to suggest she was storing these calls as evidence of instability. She had said I’m here.
“You were always the burden,” Valeria continued. “The difficult one. The one who made everything about herself. We put up with it for years. Now it’s time you gave something back.”
I closed the door.
I sent the recording to Rodrigo Salazar.
His response came within minutes: Perfect. This is exactly what we needed.
