Isabela left for Milan the next day—relieved, Alejandro sensed, to escape an awkward scene. Carmen, meanwhile, became a quiet constant. Every morning at seven she brought breakfast exactly as he liked it: eggs, double espresso, warm toast, fresh orange juice. There was no martyrdom in her gestures, only a calm competence that preserved his dignity. She spoke to him as a whole man, not a broken one.
Bit by bit he learned her story. She had come to Madrid to earn money for her younger sister’s heart surgery; waitlists at home in Galicia were too long. The operation succeeded two years earlier. Now Lucía studied medicine in Santiago, determined to become a pediatric heart surgeon. Carmen spoke four languages, read literature on her breaks, and held a degree in philology she’d never mentioned. At night, when he feigned pain, she slept on the couch in his room, rising hourly to check his blankets and water. Once, at three in the morning, believing he slept, she smoothed a strand of hair from his brow and whispered, “Please get well soon. I can’t bear to see you like this.”
In that whispered prayer was a feeling that could not be faked. Carmen loved him—not the fortune or the headlines, but the man who existed beneath them, even when he seemed helpless.
Yet Carmen was no fool. A caregiver’s eye misses little. His legs showed no muscle loss. His reflexes were too perfect. She had seen his toes flex in sleep. And one afternoon, cleaning his study, she found medical paperwork left too casually on the desk—vague, imprecise, nothing like the clinical notes she remembered from her sister’s ordeal. That night she opened the safe—she knew the code, his mother’s birthday—and read everything: a consulting agreement with Dr. Herrera, emails about “convincing staging” and “behavioral testing,” receipts for rented wheelchairs and dummy equipment.
It was all a lie. The accident. The paralysis. Her sleepless worry. And worse: the plan even included how to “reveal the truth gradually” to minimize fallout. Alejandro had scripted her feelings into an experiment never meant for her.
Before dawn she packed a suitcase, left a formal resignation letter on the kitchen desk, and slipped into a taxi. Alejandro—awake, guilty, and very suddenly in love—heard the car pull away. He found the letter and felt his chest cave in.
