‘We already handled everything,’ she said. ‘You don’t need to worry about anything anymore.’
Anything anymore.
She had been saying things like that for months.
When she talked about selling the house.
When she asked where Ricardo kept the deed.
When Mateo stopped visiting unless money, signatures, or paperwork somehow found their way into the conversation.
My knees weakened so fast I had to grab the railing.
And then Ricardo did the strangest thing of all.
He took my wrists gently, lowered my hands from the door, and looked straight into my face.
‘Don’t beg them,’ he whispered.
He wasn’t angry.
He wasn’t panicked.
He was calm in a way that frightened me more than the lock.
I stared at him. ‘Ricardo… why are you acting like you knew this could happen?’
He looked past me, toward the far end of the basement where stacked paint cans, broken tiles, and old crates had sat untouched for years.
‘Because they don’t know,’ he said quietly.
‘Don’t know what?’
His jaw tightened. ‘What’s behind that wall.’
For a second I could only blink at him.
Because my husband did not look surprised.
He looked like a man arriving at a moment he had already rehearsed in silence a thousand times.
Above us, I could hear furniture scraping across the living room floor. Mateo was saying something in a low rush. Lidia answered, sharp and impatient. They were not simply trapping us.
They were buying themselves time.
To search.
To take.
To decide what two old people were worth once they were out of sight.
Ricardo crossed the basement without hesitation. He shoved aside a tarp, lifted an old wooden crate, and knelt beside the darkest section of the wall, where the newer cement met an older run of brick I had not really looked at in years.
