She crossed her arms. “Do you still think taking care of someone means buying them real estate?”

He lowered his head. “Sometimes I don’t know how else to say it.”

“Then learn,” she said.

And Alexander learned the hardest lesson for a man used to fixing everything with money: he learned to wait. He waited when Valerie didn’t answer his texts.

He waited when she didn’t want to see him. He waited while she decided which documents to sign, which interviews to refuse, and which memories she wasn’t ready to talk about yet.

Three weeks later, Ana Paula Martinez was given back her name. Not by magic — through a painstaking search of missing-persons reports, social-work archives, and ignored police files.