Chapter 6 - THE DARK TRUTH ABOUT MOTHER
The words hit me like a physical blow. The air felt thin, suffocating.
"My mother?" I echoed, my voice barely a whisper. "What do my mother's medical records have to do with Gabriela’s safe deposit box?"
"Come to my car," Rubén said grimly. "Your father is waiting there. He needs to hear this from you."
Ten minutes later, we were sitting inside my father’s dark SUV parked in the quietest corner of the courthouse garage. Rain had begun to fall, smearing the windshield in streaks of grey. Don Arturo sat in the front passenger seat, looking shattered, holding a thick red folder that Rubén had handed him.
"Dad?" I asked cautiously from the backseat. "What is that?"
My father didn't answer right away. His hands were shaking violently as he opened the folder. Inside were yellowed hospital records, lab reports, and signed toxicology sheets dated October 14, 2014—the day our mother, Elena Vance, passed away after a sudden, mysterious illness that doctors had ruled as acute heart failure.
"Your mother wasn't sick, Javier," Don Arturo choked out, his voice cracking with a sorrow so deep it tore at my heart. "She was fine. She had a cold, a simple seasonal cold. And then... over two weeks, her organs began to shut down one by one."
"The doctors said it was an aggressive autoimmune reaction back then," I said, my heart hammering against my ribs. "They said there was nothing they could do."
"Look at the second page, Javier," Rubén said gently from the driver's seat.
I reached forward and took the page from my father’s hands.
It was a private toxicology report requested by a independent forensic lab—a report that had never been submitted to the official police record or my father's hands. The report showed lethal concentrations of digitalis—a potent heart medication—in my mother's blood system.
Attached to the report was a handwritten prescription slip under Gabriela’s name, forged using our family doctor’s stolen prescription pad.
"She poisoned her own mother..." Daniela gasped from beside me, covering her mouth in sheer horror. "My God... she killed Elena?!"
"Why?" I screamed, slamming my fist against the back of the front seat. "WHY WOULD SHE DO THAT?!"
"Look at the date on the prescription," Rubén said solemnly. "October 2014. That was the exact week your mother revised her family will, leaving the family home and 60% of her personal business stock to you, Javier, because she knew Gabriela was financially unstable."
The horrific puzzle pieces finally clicked into place in a sickening wave of clarity.
Gabriela hadn't just turned evil recently. She had been a calculating, lethal psychopath for over a decade. She murdered our mother to prevent her from changing the will. She drained my savings account to cover her tracks. And when my eight-year-old son became an obstacle to her gaining control of my father's remaining fortune, she put sedatives in his food and locked him in a freezing basement, leaving him to suffer while she tried to finalize her multi-million-dollar scam.
Don Arturo bowed his head against the dashboard and began to sob uncontrollably—the deep, agonizing weeping of a father who realized he had raised a viper in his own home.
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I reached out and placed my hand on my father's shaking shoulder.
"She’s never coming back, Dad," I said, my voice turning to cold iron. "We are going to make sure she spends the rest of her life behind bars."
