“Can it be removed?” he asks.
You hesitate, because the truth has teeth. You don’t know. Not in this year, not in this place, not with men who call themselves doctors while their hands shake over money.
Still, you pick up the charcoal and write beneath the first line, slower now.
MAYBE. BUT SOMEONE PUT IT THERE… OR LET IT GROW.
You underline the last words so hard the board nearly splinters.
His jaw tightens. For the first time since you arrived, you see a different man inside the mourning one, a man who once ruled with certainty.
“Aguilar,” he says, like a curse. “The doctor.”
You don’t nod. You don’t shake your head. You just look at him and let your silence do what your stolen voice cannot.
He paces, boots thudding on the stone. Each step is a hammer.
“He swore,” he mutters. “He looked me in the eyes and swore there was nothing.”
Then he stops as if a trap snapped shut in his mind.
“Unless,” he says, and his mouth goes dry, “there was always something. And he wanted me to believe it was hopeless.”
You watch his hands flex. Those hands have signed papers that made families disappear into fields. Those hands now hover over a crib as if touching it might break the world.
You point toward the window, toward the road, toward the outside where people come and go and secrets travel.
Then you make a gesture: coins falling into a palm.
His face hardens.
“Someone paid him,” he whispers.
You pick up the charcoal again and write one word:
WHY.
He looks at it like it’s a blade.
“Why would anyone do this?” he asks the room, as if the walls might confess. “He’s an infant. He’s—”
He stops. His eyes flick to the heavy desk. The locked drawer. The thick ledgers. The papers that decide who owns land and who gets eaten alive by the law.
“He’s my heir,” he says, quieter. “That’s why.”
You don’t have the luxury of a long plan.
A hacienda is a mouth with many tongues, and every tongue gossips.
Before noon, you feel eyes on you from the lower hall. A maid stares too long. A stable boy turns away too fast. Don Joaquín, the mayordomo, watches you like you’re a candle too close to his drapes.
He’s polite when he speaks, always polite. Polite men are the ones who can smile while they arrange your ruin.
“You’ve been upstairs more than usual,” he says, as if commenting on the weather. “The patrón has you running.”
You keep your gaze low and offer a small nod.
He steps closer, and you smell tobacco and authority.
“The baby is… difficult,” he continues. “His lordship suffers, yes. We all suffer. But grief makes people imagine things.”
He taps two fingers against your board, the one you use for notes.
“Be careful what you write,” he says softly. “Words can start fires.”
Your pulse does not show on your face. You make sure of that. You only dip your head again and move past him.
But inside you, something cold forms.
Because he didn’t ask what you wrote.
He warned you as if he already knew.
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That night, you take the candle again and you study the baby’s eyes the way a thief studies a lock.
You do it while the baron watches, silent as stone, his hope so bright it almost hurts to stand near. Felipe lies in the cradle, small fists opening and closing like he’s trying to grab the air itself.
You move the candle. The flame’s reflection dances.
And there it is again: the veil.
Not thick like a cataract you’ve heard whispered about in villages, not clouded like milk. This is too neat, too even, too perfect. It sits like a film, a transparent skin that doesn’t belong.
You wet the corner of a cloth and touch the baby’s eyelid with a gentleness you didn’t know you still had.
His lashes flutter. Still no blink against the light.
You hum, very softly, and he turns his head toward you again, searching for the sound like a sunflower turning toward sun it cannot see.
The baron’s breath catches.
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