Chapter 4 - The Friend in the Photograph
Suspicion changed the air between Rebeca and me. It did not arrive like a storm. It seeped into every pause, every glance at a phone, every question that sounded harmless.
When she went to get coffee, I searched her name with Northstar Consulting. The first result was a business registry from two years earlier. The company had been dissolved, then reopened under a different address.
The registered agent was Rebecca Solis.
I stared at the screen until the letters blurred.
When she returned, I was standing beside the window with the laptop open.
“Explain.”
She set the coffees down. “I knew you would find out.”
“You own Northstar?”
“I did.”
“Mara said the account belonged to someone close to me.”
“The account belongs to a company that uses my old registration. I haven't controlled it in eighteen months.”
“Why didn't you tell me?”
“Because Diana threatened me.”
I laughed once, without humor. “She threatened you into secretly owning a company?”
“She threatened to destroy my brother.”
Rebeca sat down. Her hands trembled around the coffee cup.
“My brother Mateo works in medical billing. Diana found out he had altered a claim for a patient who could not afford treatment. It was wrong, but the patient got care. Diana said she would report him unless I helped her set up Northstar.”
“What did Northstar do?”
“At first, it was supposed to be a shell for moving money out of an account your father was closing. I thought she wanted to hide assets from Esteban. Then the transfers kept coming.”
“How much?”
“A little over four hundred thousand dollars.”
The room went quiet.
“You stole from my family.”
“I moved money because your mother told me your father had approved it. I didn't know what it was for.”
“You didn't ask?”
“I was nineteen and terrified. Then I tried to shut it down. She sent me a photograph of Mateo leaving the hospital in handcuffs.”
Rebeca opened her phone and showed me the photograph. It was clearly staged. Mateo stood beside a police car, but the officers were blurred. A timestamp placed the image three years before the alleged incident.
“She lied,” I said.
“Yes.”
“And you still worked for her.”
“I worked against her as much as I could.”
“That is not an answer.”
She looked at me with exhausted eyes. “No. It isn't.”
I wanted to leave. I wanted to tell her that friendship could not survive this. But she reached into her bag and placed a second photograph on the table.
It showed my father standing beside a man I did not recognize. The man wore a Northstar employee badge.
“This was taken before Northstar existed,” Rebeca said. “Your father was investigating the company that became Northstar. Diana made me find out who the man was.”
“Who is he?”
“A financial analyst named Lucas Bell.”
“Where is he now?”
“Dead.”
The word sat between us.
“How?”
“An accident on the interstate, according to the report.”
I called Mara and sent her the photographs. She arrived two hours later with a folder and the expression of someone who had found a door behind the wall.
“Lucas Bell was the auditor assigned to your father's company,” she said. “He died nine days after your father did.”
“Coincidence?”
“Possibly. But both men had recently requested copies of the same ledger.”
Mara laid out bank statements. Northstar had received money from my father's company, then transferred it to a second account in the Cayman Islands. From there, funds returned as “consulting fees” to a private account under Diana's maiden name.
“Your mother wasn't simply trying to control your inheritance,” Mara said. “She has been draining it.”
“How much remains?”
“Enough to matter. Not enough to match the trust's original value.”
I thought of Diana buying my dresses, choosing my schools, telling me every expense was sacrifice. She had turned motherhood into an invoice.
Mara closed the folder. “I need a statement from Rebeca.”
Rebeca nodded. “I'll give one.”
“And from you, Valeria. But first, we need protection. Your mother has already filed a petition claiming you are mentally unfit.”
“How can she do that?”
“By presenting the therapy recording and two doctors who say you have a history of instability.”
“I have one therapist.”
“You had one therapist. The petition names three.”
I remembered the medical report in my mother's voice, the one from the recording. The doctors might not be fake. They might have been paid.
That night, I went through every photograph on my old laptop. I was searching for proof that Diana had monitored me when I found a folder marked SUMMER HOUSE.
Inside were photographs taken by my father during the last week of his life. In every photograph, Diana appeared calm and composed. In the final image, she stood beside his hospital bed holding a pill bottle.
The label was turned away.
On the back, my father's handwriting said: She says it is the new prescription. I have not seen the doctor.
I called Mara again.
“My father may have been given the wrong medication.”
“Don't touch the original photograph,” she said. “And don't tell your mother you found it.”
There was a long pause.
“Valeria,” Mara continued, “your father may not have died from an accident of nature.”
I looked at the photograph until the image of Diana's hand became all I could see.
May you like
For the first time, I wondered whether the wedding had not been the beginning of my mother's plan.
It might have been the last step in a crime that started before my father died.
