I did not yet know that learning it was only the first room, and that behind it waited the rest of the house, the fraud, the drive, the swap, the three years, each one a fresh collapse I had to stand inside and survive.

Piece by piece, the investigators reconstructed the day I had mourned for three years without ever understanding, the twentieth of November, 2019.

Santiago had been spiraling for months, they found.

He had lost his own savings first, then convinced himself he could borrow from the company and repay it before the theft was ever noticed, and when he could not, he had forged and falsified to hide the growing hole.

Sebastian had caught the discrepancies on that routine audit, and rather than expose his brother at once, he had gone to him privately.