I’ve done everything right and I’m so tired.” His father, Gael, had died when Santiago was still a baby.

His mother, Araceli, had died years later, and since then there had been only Griselda — Araceli’s sister — and the small cold apartment, and the studying done in the dark hours of the morning with borrowed books and the free internet at the public library.

Three years of it.

And a letter that said he had won, and an aunt who said he had not.

Chapter 3 — The Old Man by the Grave

What Santiago did not know was that a few meters away, sheltering under a black umbrella, a seventy-year-old man was listening to every word.

His name was Aurelio Barrera, and he had built, over a long hard lifetime, an empire of hotels and factories and companies that carried his name across the country.

He had come to the cemetery that night with his wife, Magdalena, to stand at the grave of their son — Gael — from whom he had been estranged for the last years of the young man’s life, because Aurelio’s pride had never forgiven Gael for marrying a girl named Araceli whom Aurelio had decided, without ever troubling to know her, was beneath his family.

When the boy at the grave stood up and turned, the storm-light caught his face, and Aurelio felt his heart stop in his chest.

It was Gael’s face.

It was his son’s face at seventeen, exact in every line, looking back at him across fifteen years of silence and mud and rain.

Chapter 4 — The Dropped Folder

“Young man,” Aurelio said, stepping forward before he could think better of it.

“What is your name?”