Confirmation as to why there was so little information about Silvina’s death. Men like her father snuffed out controversy; it was the default. There, in the relative safety of my office, I imagined his reaction to my prying.

He would have been ashamed of her for decades, fighting with her about her life for decades. Even as the family name was a sham, a shame. A claim of indigenous blood, but from what I could tell, it wasn’t the original family name. It was a name he had invented when he became a businessman.

Had there come a point where Matias couldn’t take Silvina’s actions any longer?

I went on to the information about the mother, Catalina.

Catalina, amid rumors of Matias’s mistresses, was easy to diagnose, even before I turned to the text. Much like my own mother, although hard to talk about. She looked worn and haggard and her gray hair had thinned, and none of the lavish sequined dresses could distract from the fact that something in their life was leaching the life from her. Or laughing at her. Skip to the part where your husband spent most of his free time posing with dead animals.

Beloved she was to many for being the face of her husband’s charitable giving. Their endowment of libraries and university buildings. Some small controversy about the name “Vilcapampa” and what it meant to indigenous communities affixed itself to the charity. But, in the end, no one cared.

To many, they were not bad people, not even close. Pillars of the community. They believed in the future. They believed they were contributing to the future even as they took the future away. I had probably pumped gasoline into my car that came from the Vilcapampa Oil Company. Had components in my phone made from rare earth minerals extracted by various Vilcapampa mining concerns.

Just as I had traveled out to their storage palace, which appeared to be the farthest and least extent of their empire. The most visible vestige of an effort to branch out. A receding tide in time—gashing the earth and extracting things from it was the expertise.

The storage palace must have been one of the companies Silvina was tasked with managing because who cared what happened to it. As far as I could tell, it operated at just twenty-five percent capacity currently, so must serve as a tax shelter. Or, just gotten lost in a spreadsheet somewhere. The Vilcapampa business empire was so vast.

Wondered which others had been on the list for Silvina to manage. What that list added up to.