At the hospital, the doctors found what years of that apartment had done to him.

Severe malnutrition.

Old injuries, healed crooked, that told their own long story.

And, in his blood, evidence of substances he had no medical reason to have been given — not the emergency injection alone, but a longer pattern beneath it, consistent with prolonged exposure over a period of years.

The doctors documented everything, carefully, in the clean clinical language that would later matter in a courtroom, and turned all of it over to the Prosecutor’s Office.

Aurelio sat outside the room with the half-heart from his safe now cupped in his palm beside its broken twin, and he made himself read every line of what had been done to his grandson, because he felt that looking away from it now would be one more cowardice, and he had spent his whole allotment of cowardice already.