Part 2…
I put the envelope inside my robe and left the bedroom just as Alejandro entered the living room. He had the laptop in one hand and the phone pressed to his ear. I smiled like any other Tuesday, as if there was no hidden transfer, a shared account used behind my back, and Emiliano’s blanket turned into a hiding place. He hung up the call when he saw me and kissed me on the forehead.
“All good?”, he asked.
For a second I was tempted to show him everything at once. But something stopped me. Perhaps it was the memory of Carmen throwing away the blanket with an overly studied calm. Maybe it was the fact that the money came from a joint account, not a personal one. If there was a lie, it was not improvised. It had been under construction for some time.
“Yes, everything is fine”, I responded.
That night I waited for Emiliano to fall asleep. I grabbed the memory and used an old adapter to open it on my laptop. There were only five files: three scanned photos, a PDF with message captures and two audios.
In the first photo Alejandro appeared hugging a dark-skinned woman in front of a neighborhood cafeteria in Colonia Condesa. The date, printed on a corner, was nine months before my civil wedding.
In the second, he was entering a building with the same woman and a child of about five years old.
In the third, Carmen was with the four of them sitting on a terrace. Everyone smiled. They all seemed like a family.
I felt a dry emptiness in my chest. I opened the PDF. They were conversations between Carmen and Lucía. My mother-in-law wrote things to him like: “Don’t worry, I’ll talk to him” or “Keep accepting the money, the important thing is that the child doesn’t lose”.
In another capture, Lucía said: “I don’t want problems with his wife, but I’m not going to continue pretending that Emiliano is Alejandro’s only son either”. I read that sentence three times in a row.
I played the first audio. It was Carmen’s voice, unmistakable, firm and cold: “You don’t show up now. He already chose. I make sure Patricia doesn’t find anything”.
The second audio was worse. Alejandro spoke in a low voice: “Just hold on a little longer. Then I sell the part of my father’s apartment and close this”.
I had to close the laptop because I started shaking.
The next day I didn’t go to work. I left Emiliano with my neighbor and went to the bank. I requested the detailed movements of the joint account for the last twelve months. The director, who had known me before I got married, printed them for me. It wasn’t one or two transfers. There were eleven. All with different amounts, all towards Lucía Serrano.
Additionally, there were cash withdrawals near the neighborhood where that woman lived. Later, I located the address in one of the photocopies of the registry: a small apartment in Lucía’s name, acquired with an entrance fee paid in part from Alejandro’s account.w
It wasn’t just old infidelity. He wasn’t just a hidden son. My husband had been using our money to maintain a parallel life, and his mother knew it. Worse still: I had helped him hide it using Emiliano’s blanket, the same one I kept looking for.
