Soledad had hidden her brother inside it.

He had debts to dangerous men, he had told her, and needed only one night’s shelter.

Their grandfather had worked as a mason on this convent decades before and had kept an old drawing of service tunnels dug beneath it in colonial times — passages for water, for stores, for the quiet movement of goods, long bricked up and forgotten.

Matías found one of the accesses behind the crypt.

And he never left.

Soledad had not meant for any of it, she said, and Inmaculada believed her, because no one invents a story that damns herself so completely if she has the freedom to invent a better one.