I looked at her without being able to hide my disbelief.
—And then?
—Then… disappeared.
The word remained suspended in the air.
—Disappeared how?
—As it sounds. Two weeks later, no one could locate her. His driver left work, the house was sold through a real estate agency, the phones stopped working. And everyone who had done business with her pretended not to know her.
A cold ran down my spine.
—Did you go to the police?
Natalia let out a bitter laugh.
—To say what? That I got into a tax fraud ring, that I have copies of compromised documents and that the woman who got me into all this disappeared? The last thing I wanted was to get attention.
He leaned slightly towards me.
—But before disappearing, Nuria met me at the Camino Real Hotel. He said he would give me compensation if I returned certain information to him. I didn’t go alone, I left my car two blocks early and entered through a side door. When I arrived, he was gone. There was only one bag from a luxury boutique. Inside… was that dress.
I looked at the garment on the table and it stopped looking beautiful. Now it was something else: a sign, a warning, perhaps a threat.
—And the initials?
—NK are his… or the name he used with me. The paper… —he looked down— was hidden when he gave me the dress. I found it later.
I opened the note. The blue ink, fine and precise, formed a short sentence:
“If this ever comes back, it will be because someone already knows who you are.”
I felt a sharp blow to my temples.
—Why didn’t you tell Alejandro?
—Because Alejandro kills me if he finds out what I got myself into. Because he thinks I just had a bad financial streak… and because a month ago I received an email from an unnamed account. It just said: “It will soon come to light”. And yesterday, your husband brings you the dress as a gift. You tell me… what would you have thought?
The logic was brutal. Someone had brought that dress to Alejandro. Someone wanted to put him inside our house, in our apparently quiet life, to force Natalia to face what she had been hiding for months.
I took a deep breath, trying to order the chaos.
—Did Alejandro know who the client of the private collection was?
—I don’t know.
—Do you keep copies of the documents?
Natalia hesitated for a few seconds before answering.
—Yeah.
—So this is no longer shame. It’s danger.
She looked at me, her eyes red.
—I don’t want to drag you into this.
—You already dragged us.
The silence that followed was heavy. An ambulance passed outside; His siren crossed the street and then everything returned to normal, as if nothing was happening: cars, distant voices, the routine of the city.
I took my phone.
