Chapter Four: Someone Is Always Watching

Mr. Duarte did not walk toward us the way a frightened man walks, or a guilty one either. He walked the way he always had, unhurried, hands loosely clasped in front of him, like he was approaching a budget meeting rather than a gravel lot behind an abandoned chapel.

"Camila," he said warmly, as though we had simply run into each other at the market. "I am glad we can finally speak plainly."

"Plainly," I repeated. "You backdated a notary stamp to make it look like my sister authorized a transfer eleven weeks before it actually happened."

Something flickered behind his eyes, so brief I almost convinced myself I had imagined it, the exact same flicker I had seen on Andres's face that morning in the cellar. I was starting to recognize that look. It was the look of someone recalculating how much of the truth the room could survive.

"I think there has been a serious misunderstanding," he said.

"Then explain it to me. Simply. The way you explain the harvest budget every October."

Beside me, Renata was still crying, quietly now, the kind of crying that comes after the loud kind has already burned itself out. Ines had gone very still, clutching her folder tighter against her chest, and I noticed she had positioned herself slightly behind me, like I was suddenly the safer place to stand.

"Renata," Duarte said gently, "why do you not let me handle this."

"No," I said, before Renata could answer. "She does not need you to handle anything. You have handled quite enough."

My radio crackled against my hip at the worst possible moment, Tomas's voice cutting through the tension with all the delicacy of a man who did not know he was interrupting anything.

"Boss's wife, you there? Everything alright out at the chapel?"

I fumbled for the volume, my face going hot despite everything else happening, and heard Duarte's mouth twitch into something that was almost, infuriatingly, amusement.

"Security detail," he said. "How resourceful of you."

"Answer my question," I said, ignoring him, ignoring the radio, ignoring everything except the folder in my hands and the man standing in front of me who had balanced our books since before I was old enough to understand what a ledger was. "Why did that stamp get backdated, and who asked for it."

Duarte studied me for a long moment, and something in his posture changed, the ease draining slowly out of his shoulders.

"I did not backdate anything," he said. "I discovered it had been backdated three days ago, during a routine audit, which is precisely why I am standing here rather than sitting comfortably in my office pretending I never saw it."

"Convenient timing," I said.

"Convenient," he agreed, "and also true, though I understand why you have no reason yet to believe me over anyone else in your life today."

Ines shifted beside me. "He came to the notary office yesterday," she said quietly, "asking to see the same file I had already pulled. That is actually why they let me go. Someone reported that I had shown an unauthorized person confidential documents."

"I did not report you," Duarte said, and for the first time his voice carried something that sounded almost like real frustration. "I would not do that to you, Ines. I came to warn you, not to expose you."

"Then who reported her," I asked.

Nobody answered.

The silence stretched long enough that I heard, somewhere behind the collapsed chapel wall, a bird startle out of the brush, wings beating hard against the quiet, and every one of us flinched at the sound like it might have been something worse.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

I assumed it was Andres, or Tomas again, or Renata's phone somehow still connected to mine through sheer force of the morning's chaos. It was none of them.

It was the same unknown number from before, the one that had first warned me not to sign anything, the one I now understood belonged to Ines.

Except Ines was standing directly in front of me, both her hands visibly wrapped around her folder, nowhere near a phone.

I looked down at the message anyway, my stomach already sinking before I finished reading it.

You should not have brought her into this. Leave the chapel now, and do not tell anyone what she showed you, or the next stamp that gets backdated will have your name on it instead of your sister's.

I looked up sharply at Ines. "Is this your number?"

She pulled her own phone halfway out of her jacket pocket with shaking hands, screen lit, no new messages at all.

"That is not me," she said. "I do not know who that is."

Which meant someone else, some second person none of us had accounted for, had known exactly where I was standing, exactly what Ines had just shown me, and exactly how to threaten me with a precision that made my skin go cold in the midday heat.

Duarte's expression had shifted entirely now, the calm gone, replaced by something that looked, for the first time since he stepped out of that car, genuinely afraid.

"Get back in your cars," he said quietly. "All of you. Now."

"Whose number is that," I demanded.

"I do not know," he said, "and that terrifies me a great deal more than anything I came here to confess."