Part Four: Two Days Later
On the second day after the dismissal, Camila’s breathing got worse.
Rodrigo had been in his study when the nurse called him. He had come to the child’s room and he had stood at the crib and looked at his daughter and he had felt the specific quality of watching something and being unable to affect it — the helplessness that was worse than anything his adult life had prepared him for, because his adult life had been a sustained exercise in the elimination of helplessness through the application of sufficient resource and sufficient will.
He had no resource that applied here. He had no will that reached what needed to be reached.
He stood at the crib.
He thought, against his intention, about the maid. About the specific quality of her face when she had said my brother is thirty-one years old now. He was a man who read people — he had spent four decades reading people across negotiating tables and boardrooms and the various arenas of business, and he had developed, across that time, a reliable sense of when someone was telling him the truth and when they were telling him something else. He had read Claudia’s face in the moment she said it.
She had been telling the truth.
He found her in the kitchen.
“The doctor,” he said.
She looked at him.
“He still exists. He still works. Is that correct?”
“Yes,” she said.
“How do we find him?”
