Part Seven: Tomás
Tomás Guerrero was fifty-three years old and had worked the estate’s gardens for nine years with the specific devotion of a man who genuinely loved what he did. The roses along the front path were his particular pride — a variety he had researched and sourced and planted and managed through two difficult summers to reach their current health. He knew each plant.
He also knew that something had been different about his daughter since the previous afternoon. He had noticed it the way parents noticed things: not a specific observable change but a quality of absence, of internal preoccupation, that was different from her ordinary manner. She had barely eaten dinner. She had not slept easily — he had heard her moving in the small house on the estate grounds where they lived.
When she came to find him in the greenhouse at midmorning and said that Don Santiago wanted to speak with him, the quality on her face was different again — still serious, still carrying something, but different from the fear he had seen the previous evening.
Santiago met him at the greenhouse door.
He spoke to Tomás directly, as a man speaking to another man, which Tomás noted because it was not always how employers spoke to gardeners.
He explained what Abril had done — not everything, not the full scope of the investigation now beginning, but enough: that she had noticed something wrong, that she had acted with courage and intelligence, that her action had very likely prevented something serious.
Tomás listened.
He looked at his daughter, who was standing to the side with her red ribbon and her cracked phone.
“I knew she watched things,” he said finally. “She always has. Since she was small. I told her it would be useful one day.” A pause. “I didn’t imagine this.”
“She said you could be fired if she was wrong,” Santiago said. “That you’d leave the same day. She offered that without hesitation.”
Tomás was quiet for a moment.
“She’s my daughter,” he said. It was a complete sentence.
Santiago looked at the roses along the front path — the specific roses that Tomás had tended through two difficult summers.
“I want to talk to you both,” he said, “about what comes next.”
