Chapter 7 - The Second LetterDaniel unfolded the paper with trembling fingers. The ink was slightly smudged, as if written over multiple days when her hands had been too weak to hold a pen properly.
“Dear Papá,
If you are reading this second note, it means you found the watch, and you figured out what Tío Leonel and Tía Irene were doing. Don’t be sad that I knew. I heard them talking in the hospital kitchen when they thought I was asleep. They thought I was too little to understand numbers, but you taught me how to count blocks when I was four.
I hid one more thing, Papá. Look behind the loose brick in the back of my closet at home. There’s a brown envelope that Brenda gave me when she visited me secretly at the hospital last month.
She didn’t leave us because she didn’t love us, Papá. Leonel and Irene lied to you about that too. They told her you hated her, and they told you she ran away. But she came back to see me. She told me the truth.
I love you, Papá. You’re the best builder of impossible things.
— Camila.”
Daniel dropped the paper onto the grass. The world around him seemed to tilt on its axis.
Brenda.
The woman he had cursed every single day for four years. The mother who he believed had abandoned their three-year-old daughter without a backward glance.
It was all a lie. A manufactured, calculated lie engineered by Leonel and Irene to isolate Daniel completely, making him entirely dependent on them, while they controlled every aspect of his life, his finances, and eventually, his dying daughter.
A cold rage, darker and more profound than anything he had felt before, settled deep into his bones.
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He didn’t just have corrupt in-laws. He had architects of a systematic psychological cage designed to destroy his entire family.
And Brenda was still out there.
