He gathered all the pieces on his table. Salomé’s drawing, Martín’s medal, the forged will, Beatriz’s recording, the connections between Gonzalo and Aurelio. Everything pointed in one direction. Ramiro was innocent. Gonzalo had attacked Sara to silence her. Aurelio had manipulated the case to protect his partner, but something was missing: direct testimony from someone who had seen what happened that night. Salomé couldn’t talk. Martín was in hiding. Without an eyewitness, everything else was circumstantial.
The clock struck 3 a.m., less than 30 hours until the execution. Then Dolores’s phone rang, an unknown number. Mrs. Medina. The voice was male, trembling. Who is this? My name is Martín. Martín Reyes. I know you’ve been looking for me, and I know time is running out. Dolores felt her heart stop. Where are you? Why are you hiding? Because if they find me, they’ll kill me, like they tried to five years ago. But I can’t stay silent any longer.
They’re going to execute an innocent man, and I have the evidence to save him. What evidence? A long silence. The night Sara died, I was there. I saw everything, and I saw something else that no one knows, something that changes everything you think you know about this case. What did you see? Sara Fuentes didn’t die that night, Mrs. Medina. I got her out of that house before Gonzalo finished her off. Sara is alive, and she’s been waiting for this moment for five years. And Dolores couldn’t process what she had just heard.
Sara Viva, five years in hiding while her husband awaited execution. That’s impossible, he said. There was a funeral, a death certificate. The body—the body was so badly damaged that identification was based on records. Dental records, Martín interrupted. Records that Aurelio Sánchez had falsified. The body they buried wasn’t Sara. Whose was it then? A woman with no family who died that same week in a hospital. Aurelio has connections at the morgue. He made the switch. It was all planned to bury the case along with the supposed victim.
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Dolores needed to see to believe. Where is Sara now? Nearby, but I can’t tell you where over the phone. We don’t know who might be listening. I need her to come to my mother’s house in San Jerónimo tomorrow. I’ll explain everything there. Time is running out, Martín. There are less than 30 hours left. I know, that’s why I decided to speak. Sara wanted to wait until she had all the legal evidence, but there’s no time left. If Ramiro dies, Gonzalo wins for good. And Sara has sacrificed too much to allow that.
Dolores hung up the phone, her hands trembling. If this was true, it was the most extraordinary case of her career. A woman who faked her death to protect her daughter. An innocent husband convicted of a crime that never happened. A brother willing to destroy everything out of greed. She packed a small suitcase. Tomorrow she would travel to San Jerónimo. Tomorrow she would learn the whole truth. What she didn’t know was that someone had intercepted the call. In his cell, Ramiro Fuentes slept for the first time in years without nightmares.
His daughter’s words had ignited something within him—hope. But that night, sleep brought back memories he had blocked for five hundred years. He saw himself on the sofa in his house, drunk, on the verge of passing out. He heard voices: Sara’s voice, first calm, then frightened, and another voice, a voice he knew well. « You shouldn’t have gotten involved in this, Sara. I warned you, » said Gonzalo. Ramiro tried to move in his sleep. He tried to get up to defend his wife, but his body wouldn’t respond.
The alcohol had paralyzed him. He heard a bang, a scream, silence. Then footsteps approaching, a hand placing something in his, the cold of metal. When you wake up, this will be over, and you’ll be the perfect scapegoat, brother. Ramiro woke up drenched in sweat, screaming. The guards rushed to his cell, thinking he was trying to hurt himself, but Ramiro just kept repeating the same phrase. Now I remember. Now I remember everything. My brother was my brother. I heard his voice. He put the gun in my hands while I slept.
The younger guard looked at his partner. “Do you think he’s telling the truth?” The veteran shook his head. “Everyone tells the truth when the end is near, but that doesn’t matter anymore.” It mattered more than he imagined. At the Santa María home, Carmela watched Salomé with concern. Since she had stopped speaking, the girl communicated only through drawings. She drew obsessively, filling page after page with the same image. Carmela gave her a new box of crayons.
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