You don’t sleep after you write the words.
Not really.
You lie on a thin cot in the servant’s corridor and listen to the hacienda breathe, the way a big house always does when it thinks nobody’s watching. Wood pops. A distant shutter taps. Somewhere, a mule shifts in its stall and the sound travels up through stone like a warning.
In your mind, the baby’s eyes float in the candlelight again: the almost-nothing veil, the slick whisper of it, the way it catches the flame at one particular angle like a secret trying to blink.
You close your own eyes and feel the old instinct rise in you, sharp as a thorn: don’t be seen knowing too much. Knowing gets you sold. Knowing gets you buried.
But you already crossed the line the moment you put charcoal to board.
NO NACIÓ CIEGO. HAY UN VELO.
You wrote it like a prayer and a threat in the same breath.
In the hours before dawn, you decide something else, something even more dangerous than writing.
You decide you’re not going to let them keep winning.
When the rooster cries, the kitchen is already alive with steam and knives and hurried footsteps. You move through it like you always do, quiet hands, eyes down, the kind of quiet that makes men forget you are a person.
That forgetfulness has kept you alive.
You carry a tray upward again, because the house has trained everyone to move around the grief upstairs as if grief were a tiger behind a door. The servants leave food and flee. The master eats without tasting. The baby exists like a rumor no one is allowed to confirm.
Today, though, you don’t flee.
You knock softly, and when the baron says “Come,” you step in with the tray and the board under your arm, still smudged with last night’s charcoal.
He looks worse in the morning light. His hair is uncombed. His collar is wrong. His eyes have that cracked, sleepless shine of a man who keeps falling into the same nightmare and insisting it’s real life.
You set the tray down, then lift the board so he can read it again.
He stares at the words as if they might change if he looks hard enough.
“A veil,” he repeats, and his voice is thin, almost childlike. “So… what does that mean?”
You point to your own eye. Then to the baby’s. Then you mime a thin sheet, the way cloth slides over something precious.
He swallows.
“Can it be removed?” he asks.
You hesitate, because the truth has teeth. You don’t know. Not in this year, not in this place, not with men who call themselves doctors while their hands shake over money.
Still, you pick up the charcoal and write beneath the first line, slower now.
MAYBE. BUT SOMEONE PUT IT THERE… OR LET IT GROW.
You underline the last words so hard the board nearly splinters.
His jaw tightens. For the first time since you arrived, you see a different man inside the mourning one, a man who once ruled with certainty.
“Aguilar,” he says, like a curse. “The doctor.”
You don’t nod. You don’t shake your head. You just look at him and let your silence do what your stolen voice cannot.
He paces, boots thudding on the stone. Each step is a hammer.
“He swore,” he mutters. “He looked me in the eyes and swore there was nothing.”
Then he stops as if a trap snapped shut in his mind.
“Unless,” he says, and his mouth goes dry, “there was always something. And he wanted me to believe it was hopeless.”
You watch his hands flex. Those hands have signed papers that made families disappear into fields. Those hands now hover over a crib as if touching it might break the world.
You point toward the window, toward the road, toward the outside where people come and go and secrets travel.
Then you make a gesture: coins falling into a palm.
His face hardens.
“Someone paid him,” he whispers.
You pick up the charcoal again and write one word:
WHY.
He looks at it like it’s a blade.
“Why would anyone do this?” he asks the room, as if the walls might confess. “He’s an infant. He’s—”
He stops. His eyes flick to the heavy desk. The locked drawer. The thick ledgers. The papers that decide who owns land and who gets eaten alive by the law.
“He’s my heir,” he says, quieter. “That’s why.”
You don’t have the luxury of a long plan.
A hacienda is a mouth with many tongues, and every tongue gossips.
Before noon, you feel eyes on you from the lower hall. A maid stares too long. A stable boy turns away too fast. Don Joaquín, the mayordomo, watches you like you’re a candle too close to his drapes.
He’s polite when he speaks, always polite. Polite men are the ones who can smile while they arrange your ruin.
“You’ve been upstairs more than usual,” he says, as if commenting on the weather. “The patrón has you running.”
You keep your gaze low and offer a small nod.
He steps closer, and you smell tobacco and authority.
“The baby is… difficult,” he continues. “His lordship suffers, yes. We all suffer. But grief makes people imagine things.”
He taps two fingers against your board, the one you use for notes.
“Be careful what you write,” he says softly. “Words can start fires.”
Your pulse does not show on your face. You make sure of that. You only dip your head again and move past him.
But inside you, something cold forms.
Because he didn’t ask what you wrote.
He warned you as if he already knew.
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