Part Three: The Dismissal
Rodrigo was surrounded by lawyers the following morning.
This was not unusual — he was always surrounded by some version of the institutional apparatus of a large business — but the specific papers on the table were unusual, and Claudia understood what they were when she brought the coffee tray: the will. He was updating the will, which meant he had accepted the number, which meant he had passed through some internal threshold and arrived at the territory of preparing for what he had been told was coming.
She set down the tray. She poured the coffee. She started to leave.
Then she stopped.
She turned back.
“Sir,” she said.
The lawyers looked at her. Rodrigo looked at her with the expression he wore when he was in the middle of something and had been interrupted.
“I apologize for the interruption,” she said. “But I — there is something I need to tell you. About a doctor.”
The expression on Rodrigo’s face moved through several things quickly. Surprise, because she had never done this — had never directly addressed him about anything beyond the household’s practical functioning. Then something harder.
“I know a doctor,” she said. “He treated my brother. My brother had — the doctors said my brother would not —” She stopped. She had not prepared the words as carefully as she should have. “My brother was dying. He went to this doctor. He is thirty-one years old now.”
Rodrigo said: “How dare you.”
The words were not loud. They were the quiet form of something that could have been loud.
“I’m not suggesting a charlatan,” she said quickly. “I’m not —”
“Leave,” he said.
She left.
She stood in the corridor outside the room and she breathed. She was crying, which she had not planned to do, and she was angry, which she had also not planned to do — not at Rodrigo, exactly, but at the situation, at the specific injustice of having something that might help and not being able to make it heard.
She went back to work.
She changed Camila’s linens. She prepared Camila’s midday meal — the specific meal that the nutritionist had prescribed, which Claudia followed with the precision of someone who understands that the small things are the only things currently available to do and that they therefore matter completely.
She did not give up.
