Panic burned away the pretense. He called Herrera at eight. Carmen knew; she was gone. The doctor suggested perhaps the plan had gone too far. Alejandro didn’t care. He had fallen in love with the woman who had loved him when he pretended to be broken. He dropped the charade, walked as he always could, and discovered that money meant nothing when searching for someone who had every reason to hide. Detectives, notices, cheap hotels—Carmen had vanished. He learned only that she’d withdrawn her savings: twenty-five thousand euros, three years of careful sacrifice.
Isabela returned from Milan, surprised to see him on his feet, and proposed Marbella without asking a single question about his “paralyzed” week. He ended it on the spot. That night, alone in the golden tomb of his mansion, he finally thought not of parties or headlines but of Carmen’s sister. If he could not find Carmen directly, perhaps Lucía would know. In Santiago, he located the fifth-year medical student with the same dark eyes and gentle features. When he begged for help, Lucía listened, stony and protective. Carmen wasn’t angry, she said; she was shattered. He had toyed with her heart to test another woman. Still, Lucía saw the sincerity of his remorse. If he truly loved Carmen, he should leave her in peace. Carmen deserved the kind of man who would never have lied to her in the first place.
He returned to Madrid carrying a weight he couldn’t set down. Maybe love meant letting go. In a small boardinghouse in Santiago, Carmen heard every word Lucía relayed—that he was sorry beyond words, that if he could undo it he would—and something she’d buried stirred back to life.
Two weeks later a courier arrived from Galicia with a small parcel and a note. Inside lay Alejandro’s silver crucifix—his mother’s gift at sixteen—lost during the week of his masquerade and quietly kept by Carmen. The note said she would meet him the next day at three in the Sabatini Gardens—if he truly had changed.
He arrived an hour early. At exactly three, she came in a simple beige coat, hair loose, thinner than he remembered. They stood apart for a moment, taking each other in. Then Carmen spoke. Three years ago, fresh from Galicia and terrified, she had sat crying on a park bench outside his mansion, unsure she was good enough even to apply for a housekeeping job. He had jogged past, stopped, offered her a handkerchief, and told her that courage wasn’t the absence of fear but action despite it. He’d offered to walk her to the interview and put in a word with her boss—never saying he was the boss.
She had fallen for that man, the one kind enough to help a stranger. Over time she watched wealth calcify him—cool, distant, all edges and armor. During his counterfeit paralysis, she’d glimpsed the man from the bench again. That was why the lie cut so deep.
Alejandro knelt in the wet grass. He promised never to lie to her again, to love and respect her every day of his life. People stared; he didn’t care. She helped him up and gave him one chance—only one. The first lie would end it.
They kissed in the Sabatini Gardens as the November sun burnished the city gold, and for the first time Alejandro understood that wealth is measured not in assets, but in the capacity to love and be loved without conditions.
Two years later they married in those same gardens before two hundred guests—Lucía, now a rising cardiac surgeon, and the household staff among them. Carmen remained simple and kind. Alejandro became the man she had always seen: generous, humane, capable of an unguarded love. On Sundays they paused by the bench where it had all begun and silently gave thanks—for a love born of kindness, rebuilt on truth, and brave enough to grant a second chance.
