That night, you take the candle again and you study the baby’s eyes the way a thief studies a lock.
You do it while the baron watches, silent as stone, his hope so bright it almost hurts to stand near. Felipe lies in the cradle, small fists opening and closing like he’s trying to grab the air itself.
You move the candle. The flame’s reflection dances.
And there it is again: the veil.
Not thick like a cataract you’ve heard whispered about in villages, not clouded like milk. This is too neat, too even, too perfect. It sits like a film, a transparent skin that doesn’t belong.
You wet the corner of a cloth and touch the baby’s eyelid with a gentleness you didn’t know you still had.
His lashes flutter. Still no blink against the light.
You hum, very softly, and he turns his head toward you again, searching for the sound like a sunflower turning toward sun it cannot see.
The baron’s breath catches.
“He hears you,” he whispers. “He knows you’re there.”
You want to answer: He knows because you’re the first person who listens to him instead of labeling him.
But you can’t say it. So you write on your board:
HE’S NOT EMPTY. HE’S TRAPPED.
The baron stares at the word trapped until his eyes go wet with rage instead of grief.
“What do we do?” he asks you, and the question feels wrong in his mouth, like a king asking a chained girl how to save his kingdom.
You lift your board and write:
WE FIND OUT WHO BENEFITS.
Then you add another line, and your hand trembles just once:
AND WE FREE HIS EYES BEFORE THEY STEAL HIS LIFE.
The baron makes a decision that changes the air in the house.
He tells Don Joaquín that Doctor Aguilar is to be summoned again.
Not tomorrow. Not next week.
Now.
You watch Don Joaquín’s smile freeze for half a heartbeat before it returns, smooth as oil.
“As you wish,” the mayordomo says. “I’ll send a rider.”
You know a rider will go, yes.
But you also know a second message will go somewhere else, carried in the same saddlebag.
So you do something reckless.
You follow.
You wait until dusk, until the rider leaves the courtyard and the dust rises behind him like a brown ghost. Then you slip out through the side gate with a shawl over your head and your board tucked under your arm like a piece of laundry.
You keep to the trees, to the low walls, to the places servants learn to hide because owners don’t look there.
Your heart bangs like a drum nobody asked for.
You trail the rider until the road forks near the old chapel, the one with cracked saints and candles that smell of desperation.
The rider slows.
A man waits there already.
Not a priest. Not a farmer.
A man in a clean coat, boots polished, hands too soft for fieldwork.
Doctor Enrique Aguilar.
Even in the dim light, you recognize the leather bag, the posture of a person who believes his education makes him untouchable.
The rider hands him something small. A folded paper. A message.
Aguilar reads it, and you see his mouth curl into something that is not a smile.
He reaches into his pocket and pays the rider.
Coins clink.
Your stomach turns.
Because now you have proof of something you already feared.
The doctor isn’t being called.
He’s being warned.
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