Then it happened.
Salome leaned slowly towards her mother’s ear.
And he whispered something.
No one else heard him.
Neither the guards.
Nor the social worker.
Nor Colonel Méndez, who watched from the half-open door with his arms crossed and the file still fresh in his memory.
Only Ramira.
And what the girl said was so simple, so impossible, that for a moment the woman stopped breathing.
—It wasn’t you—Salome whispered. —I saw who it was.
Ramira remained motionless.
The tears kept falling, but they were no longer just tears of pain. They were tears of pure shock. He hugged her a little tighter, trembling.
“What did you say, my love?” she murmured, her voice breaking.
Salome barely moved away. Her large, strangely serene eyes fixed on her mother’s.
“I saw the man with the snake watch,” she said in a very low voice. “He came in through the back door that night. You weren’t home when he passed by.”
Ramira’s heart began to beat with a new violence.
For five years she repeated her innocence until her voice was hoarse. But no one wanted to listen. No one wanted to hear that she had gone out to the store for a few minutes that night, and that when she returned she found the door open, the lamp on the floor, and Esteban’s body lying next to the dining room table. No one wanted to believe that the gun with his fingerprints had a simple explanation: it was the old pistol he kept in the house, which she instinctively picked up when she saw him bleeding, still not understanding what had happened.
The prosecution built the rest.
Tired wife.
Previous arguments.
Money.
Jealousy.
A vague witness and a court-appointed lawyer who already seemed defeated before the trial.
Ramira swallowed.
—Salome… why didn’t you say so before?
The girl glanced down at her own worn-out shoes for a moment.
“Because he saw me hiding behind the curtain,” she whispered. “And he told me that if I talked, they would kill you too. Then Aunt Clara told me to stop making things up, that it was best to forget. That you had done something wrong and that I should behave.”
The entire room seemed to shrink.
Ramira felt a wave of cold rise up her arms.
Clara.
Esteban’s sister.
The woman who took Salomé in after the arrest.
The same one who cried at the trial like any other widow.
The same one who insisted that Ramira had always been “nervous” and “capable of anything when she got upset.”
Ramira brought both of her cuffed hands to the girl’s face.
—My love… listen to me carefully. Have you seen that man before?
Salome nodded.
