My parents, obviously, were lying to save themselves.

My relatives, even the well-meaning ones, had their own financial interests tangled up in the trust, their own reasons to want the story to go one way or another.

Even I, the victim, could be dismissed as an interested party, a daughter with a grudge, a woman who stood to gain from her parents’ downfall.

That is the trap that closes around victims: everyone who knows the truth can be accused of a motive to distort it, and so the truth itself becomes suspect, contaminated by the interests of everyone in a position to tell it.

But Don Ernesto had no motive.