I didn’t rush her.
I remembered how it felt when my father put his hand on my shoulder and gave me one true thing to stand on, and I tried, in my own way, to be that for her — not a wronged wife come to gloat, but the one person on earth who knew exactly what she’d just learned about herself, standing in front of her, not hating her.
Somewhere in that silence she stopped being the other woman and started being a person in the same wreck I was in.
“He told me I was the real thing,” she finally said, barely audible.
“He told me you were the mistake he was stuck in.”
“I know,” I said.
“He told me you were an investment.
He tells everyone whatever keeps them useful.
It isn’t about you.
It was never about either of us.”
The next morning Karla walked into the district attorney’s office with Beatriz beside her, and she brought everything — thousands of texts, voice notes, the fake financial presentations Damian had built to reel her in.
Two women who were supposed to spend the whole thing hating each other instead sat down together and handed the prosecutors the last nails for his coffin.
I have thought about that a great deal since.
He engineered the entire scheme on the assumption that his victims would never compare notes.