CHAPTER 1: The Paper Trail
CHAPTER 1: The Paper Trail
The police didn’t leave after the arrest.
They stayed.
The kitchen that once felt like a private battlefield was now treated like a crime scene. Blue gloves. Evidence bags. Quiet voices exchanging terms I barely understood.
I sat in the same chair, still holding my belly, still afraid to breathe too deeply—like the world might break again if I moved wrong.
Alejandro stood beside the table, answering questions with a calm precision that didn’t feel human anymore. It felt trained. Controlled. Final.
One officer placed the forged medical reports into an evidence folder.
Another photographed the heated iron.
And when they lifted the “casualty notice,” the lead investigator paused just a second longer than the rest.
“This level of forgery,” he said quietly, “didn’t happen overnight.”
That sentence changed the air.
Because it meant this wasn’t anger.
It was planning.
My throat tightened. “She told me he was dead,” I whispered. My voice sounded чужer to me than anything else in the room. “For months…”
Alejandro turned slightly toward me for the first time since entering the house. His expression softened—but only just.
“I know,” he said. “That’s why I came back the way I did.”
May you like
That wasn’t an explanation.
It was a warning of something still unfinished.
