Valeria finally looked at him.
—He died hours later. Not on the road. In an operating room.
Victor let out a muffled sound.
Half a moan.
Half roar.
He had to lean on a chair to avoid falling.
For two years she had mourned an instant death.
Now he discovered that Catalina had arrived alive.
Perhaps he felt afraid.
Perhaps he asked about him.
Perhaps she died alone among strangers who decided that her life was worth less than someone else’s.
“And why isn’t the skeleton hers?” he asked, breathless.
Valeria dried her face with trembling hands.
—Because when they covered up what they did, they also manipulated the death records. The body was cremated and replaced in the files. The remains they exhumed to fulfill Luna’s wish belong to another woman.
Victor opened his eyes as if he had been hit again.
—So… we were never able to fire her.
Valeria shook her head.
—No.
Luna’s coffin seemed colder than before.
More cruel.
More unbearable.
“Did Luna know this?” he asked.
The doctor took a while to answer.
-Yeah.
Victor felt betrayal and tenderness at the same time.
An unbearable mix.
—Since when?
—For eight months now. He found some old studies among my papers. He confronted me. I couldn’t keep lying to him. I told him part of it. Not all of it. But enough.
—And they hid it from me?
—She didn’t want to destroy you while she was fighting to stay alive. She said she’d already seen you break once. She didn’t want to see you fall again.
Victor clenched his fists until his nails dug in.
I could see Luna doing it.
Keeping silent out of love.
Carrying a monstrous truth as his own body shut down.
“Her last wish…” he whispered.
Valeria nodded.
“It wasn’t just that they buried her with her mother. It was a way to force us to open the tomb. To verify if the remains were truly Catalina’s. Luna suspected that nothing added up. She wanted to leave a truth that you could no longer ignore.”
The air seemed to disappear from the place.
Luna had not made a macabre request.
He had set one last trap.
A desperate trap.
From death.
So that the truth would come to light.
Victor turned towards his daughter’s body.
He looked at her for a long time.
And then she understood his “forgive me”.
I wasn’t apologizing for leaving.
I was apologizing to him for having used him as my only way out.
He rested his forehead on the edge of the coffin.
—My child… you were alone with all of this…
Valeria approached slowly.
—There’s more.
Victor raised his head.
The doctor took a yellowish envelope, folded at the corners, out of her bag.
—Luna forced me to swear to her that if anything went wrong, I would only hand this over to you when nothing could be stopped.
He took it with trembling fingers.
He immediately recognized his daughter’s handwriting.
He opened the envelope right there.
And he began to read aloud, because he no longer had the strength to do it silently.
“Dad, if you are reading this, it means that I left too and that you found what I wanted you to see.
Forgive me for being silent.
I didn’t do it out of cowardice.
I did it because I wanted you, for once, not to look at me as a sick person, but as someone capable of finishing something important.
Mom didn’t die like they told us.
And I didn’t get sick by chance.”
Victor looked up, frozen.
He continued reading.
“Years ago, Valeria found toxicity studies that should never have existed. There were traces of an industrial compound in my mother’s blood.
The same compound appeared later, in small doses, in my tests.
Someone wanted to erase Mom.
And then, without knowing it, he left me with the same sentence.
Check the old toolbox in the workshop.
Look under the false bottom.
That’s what Mom hid before the accident.”
The paper fell from Victor’s hands.
For a second, nobody moved.
Then he ran away.
He walked through the corridor ignoring the shouts.
He passed by Clara, who wanted to follow him.
Driving like a man out of his mind, he arrived at the house.
He entered Catalina’s workshop, that place that no one had touched since her death.
He threw away tools.
He opened drawers.
He banged on the workbench until he found the hidden compartment under the wood.
And there it was.
A plastic envelope.
Inside, an old memory and several documents.
Invoices.
Photos.
Copies of printed mail.
Names of executives of a chemical company.
Medical reports.
And a notebook belonging to Catalina, written in hurried handwriting.
“If something happens to me, it will be because of what I discovered at the plant.”
Victor let out a brutal sob.
Catalina had not suffered a simple accident.
He had discovered illegal dumping of toxic waste.
He had gathered evidence.
And someone silenced her.
Years later, Luna became ill due to prolonged exposure to the same contaminant in the water of the neighborhood near the plant.
It was not an isolated tragedy.
It was a long crime.
Dirty.
Calculated.
That same night, the police arrived at the wake.
Not because of the interrupted funeral.
But not because of the complaint that Valeria finally dared to sign along with everything that Victor handed over.
There were raids.
Court orders.
Names of doctors, businessmen, and officials began to surface within days.
The case exploded across the country.
And in the midst of the scandal, Victor made one last decision.
He did not bury Luna that day.
Wait.
Weeks later, when they finally managed to recover Catalina’s true ashes, father and daughter were laid to rest together.
This time without lies.
No substitutions.
Without bought silence.
At the final burial, Clara left between them an old photo where the three of them smiled covered in flour, making bread on an ordinary Sunday.
Victor knelt in front of the two urns.
He touched them with a broken tenderness.
And he said something that no one forgot.
—They took them from me thinking they were leaving me with nothing. But you two made everyone tremble from beyond the grave.
The wind blew softly through the trees of the cemetery.
Clara took her father’s hand.
And for the first time in a long time, he cried differently.
Not like a defeated man.
But as someone who, in the midst of horror, had finally found the truth.
Because Luna didn’t ask to hug her mother to rest.
She asked to hug her so that together, even after death, they could force the world to listen to what they had tried to bury in life.
