Sara was on the phone in the kitchen. Her voice was a furious whisper. “I told you not to look for me anymore. What you did is unforgivable. If you don’t fix this, I’m going to talk. I don’t care what you threaten me with.” She hung up violently and saw Ramiro watching her from the doorway.
“Who were you talking to?” “No one.” Go to sleep. You’ve had enough to drink. Ramiro wanted to ask more questions, but the alcohol was already clouding his thoughts.
He slumped onto the living room sofa and closed his eyes. Within minutes, he was fast asleep. What happened next, Ramiro wouldn’t remember, but someone else would. Salomé woke to the sound of a door. She got out of bed and walked into the hallway. From the shadows, she saw something her three-year-old eyes couldn’t comprehend, but that her memory would forever hold.
A figure entered the house. A man the little girl knew well. A man who always wore blue shirts and brought her candy when he visited. Sara screamed, then silence. Little Salomé hid in the hallway closet, trembling, as the man in the blue shirt walked toward where her father slept. Dolores spent the entire night reviewing the Fuentes case file.
Hundreds of pages, photographs she preferred not to remember, testimonies, expert reports—everything pointed to Ramiro: his fingerprints, his clothes, his lack of a solid alibi. But there were cracks, small, almost invisible, but they were there.
The first witness, a neighbor named Pedro Sánchez, initially stated that he saw a man leaving the Fuentes house at 11 p.m. Three days later, in a second statement, he specified that it was Ramiro. Why the change? Who pressured him?
