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, she 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’s. 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.
Dolores needed to see it to believe it. 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 you to come to San Jerónimo tomorrow, to my mother’s house. I’ll explain everything there. Time is running out, Martín. 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 in 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, about to pass 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,” Gonzalo’s voice. Ramiro tried to move and
In the dream. He tried to get up to defend his wife, but his body wouldn’t respond.
The alcohol had paralyzed him. He heard a thud, a scream, silence. Then footsteps approaching him, 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 a 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 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.
“Can you show me what you see in your dreams, little one?” Salomé took the crayons and began to draw. This time the drawing was different, more detailed, as if five years of maturity allowed her to express what she couldn’t before. She drew the house, the living room, a figure on the floor, another standing in a blue shirt, but she added something new: a half-open door in the background and behind it another small figure, a girl with yellow hair, herself observing everything. And in the corner of the drawing, something Carmela didn’t expect: a hand sticking out of the house’s window, as if someone were helping the figure on the floor escape.
