Chapter Three: The Date That Shouldn't Exist

I told Andres I needed to check on the north block before the afternoon heat came in, which was not technically a lie, since I did walk through the north block on my way to the truck, I simply did not mention that I had no intention of stopping there.

He offered to come with me. I told him Tomas needed him more, since apparently our vineyard now required an armed security consultation before breakfast, which was a low thing to say, but it worked, because guilt is a very useful tool when you know exactly where someone else's guilt lives.

Tomas caught me at the truck anyway.

"You should not go anywhere alone today," he said, shotgun no longer in hand, thankfully, though I noticed he did not look entirely comfortable without it.

"I will be fine, Tomas."

"Boss said."

"Boss does not know everything," I said, and immediately felt strange saying it out loud, because six hours ago I would have said the opposite without thinking twice.

Tomas studied me for a long moment, the way men who have spent their whole lives reading weather patterns tend to study people too, like he was deciding whether a storm was coming.

"Take the radio at least," he said, and pressed a small handheld unit into my palm before I could argue, the same kind he used to talk to the front gate. "Channel two. I will be listening."

I almost laughed, despite everything. Somehow being handed a walkie talkie by a sixty year old security guard who called my husband boss made the entire morning feel briefly, absurdly normal, like I was a teenager sneaking out rather than a woman driving toward proof that her marriage, her family, and possibly her own sister had all quietly become strangers to her overnight.

The old chapel road took eighteen minutes from the estate, most of it along the ridge that separated our land from the Sterling vineyard, abandoned now for almost a decade after old man Sterling's family finally gave up fighting each other over who should inherit it. The chapel itself was barely standing, roof half collapsed, the kind of place tourists photographed for its romantic ruin and never actually got close enough to see the rot underneath.

I called Renata on the way, mostly because I could not stand not knowing anymore.

"Hey," she answered, too quickly, the way people answer when they have been staring at their phone waiting for it to ring.

"I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer honestly."

A pause. Not a long one. Just long enough.

"Okay," she said.

"Did you sign anything for Ferreira Estate in the last month? Any transfer paperwork, any authorization, anything with the notary office?"

The silence this time was longer.

"Camila, I can explain."

My hands tightened on the wheel hard enough that my knuckles went pale.

"Explain now."

"Andres asked me to co sign something months ago," she said, the words tumbling out fast now, like she had been waiting to say them and dreading it in equal measure. "He told me it was routine, insurance paperwork, something about liability coverage for the estate in case anything happened to either of you. He said you already knew. I believed him, Camila. I swear to you I believed him."

I felt something cold settle low in my stomach, colder than anything from that morning's television broadcast, colder than the safe, colder than the sound of a gun being loaded above my head.

"He used you," I said quietly.

"I did not know," she said, and I could hear that she was crying now, actually crying, in a way my sister almost never allowed herself to do in front of anyone, even over the phone. "If I had known it would end up looking like I stole from you, I would never have signed a single page."

I did not know whether to believe her. That was the worst part of this entire morning, worse than the betrayal itself. I no longer knew how to tell the difference between someone lying to protect themselves and someone telling the truth badly, because apparently everyone I loved had decided, independently, that keeping things from me was an act of protection rather than betrayal.

"I have to go," I told her, and hung up before she could answer, because I had just turned onto the gravel path leading up to the chapel, and there, parked crookedly in the shade of the one tree still standing, was a car I did not recognize.

I parked a careful distance away and sat there for a moment with the engine running, the radio Tomas gave me sitting heavy in the cup holder, and considered, seriously, turning around.

Then the driver's door of the other car opened, and a young woman stepped out, maybe twenty five, dressed like she had come straight from an office rather than a countryside meeting, clutching a folder against her chest the exact way I had clutched mine three days ago in a different context entirely.

"Mrs. Ferreira," she said, before I had even fully closed my own door. "My name is Ines Alvares. I worked the front desk at the notary office until yesterday, when I was told to take a sudden and very generous leave of absence."

"You are the one who texted me."

"Yes."

"Why did they let you go?"

She glanced back toward the road, quick and instinctive, the look of someone who had been checking behind herself all morning.

"Because I asked too many questions about a signature," she said, "and because I made copies of the file before I left, which I probably should not tell you, since it means I broke about four different laws this week."

She held the folder out to me, and I took it with hands that had not fully stopped shaking since I opened that safe.

"Whose signature," I asked.

"Look at the authorization date on the co signing page," she said. "Then look at the notary stamp date beside it."

I opened the folder right there in the gravel lot, the wind pulling at the corners of the pages, and found the page she meant.

The signing date said eleven weeks ago.

The notary stamp, the official seal confirming the document had actually been processed and filed, was dated six days ago.

"That is not possible," I said. "A stamp cannot be applied that far after a signing unless"

"Unless someone backdated the paperwork to make it look like it happened months before the merger was ever announced," Ines finished for me. "Which means whoever did this needed your sister's signature to already exist on file well before anyone started asking questions. They needed history. A believable timeline."

My mouth had gone completely dry.

"Who requested the stamp be backdated," I asked. "Whose name authorized that."

Ines opened her mouth to answer, and that was the exact moment I heard gravel crunching behind us, a second car turning up the chapel road, moving fast enough that dust rose behind it in a long pale cloud.

Ines's face went white.

"That is not supposed to be here," she said. "Nobody else was supposed to know about this meeting."

I turned toward the sound, my heart climbing back into my throat all over again, and watched the car come to a hard stop at the bottom of the path.

The driver's door opened before the engine had even finished ticking, and Renata stepped out, looking straight at me across the gravel, her face streaked with the same tears she had been crying on the phone twenty minutes earlier.

"Camila," she called out, her voice shaking. "You need to hear this from me before she tells you her version. Please. Just give me one minute before you decide what kind of person I am."

Behind her, a second figure stepped out of the passenger side, someone I recognized instantly despite never once expecting to see him standing on this particular gravel road.

It was our family's accountant, Mr. Duarte, the same quiet, careful man who had balanced both our books for thirty years, and the look on his face was not the look of a man who had come here by accident.