She pressed her lips together, and Leandro nodded patiently. “It doesn’t have to be today,” he said, and continued with his story.

Orphaned and heiress to a huge fortune, Victoria was left under the guardianship of a young lawyer named Ignacio Sanchís who had been named the executor of the Ubachs’ estate. Sanchís was a brilliant man whom Ubach had taken under his protection from a young age. An orphan, he had studied with a scholarship awarded by the Ubach Foundation. It was rumored that in fact he was the illegitimate son of the banker, the fruit of an illicit relationship he’d had with a well-known actress of the time.

Little Victoria always had a special bond with Sanchís. They were both surrounded by all the luxuries and privileges the Ubach empire could buy, and yet they were alone in the world. Ignacio Sanchís often came to the family house, where he would conduct business matters with the banker in the garden. Victoria would spy on him from the attic windows. One day, after Sanchís came across her unexpectedly when she was swimming in the pool, he told her he’d never known his parents and had grown up in La Navata orphanage. From then on, whenever Sanchís came to the mansion, Victoria no longer hid and would come down to greet him.

Señora Ubach didn’t like Ignacio, and did not allow her daughter to speak to him. He was a nobody, she said. The matriarch staved off her boredom by meeting her young lovers in luxury hotels in Madrid, or sleeping it off in her bedroom on the third floor. She never became aware that her daughter and the young lawyer had become good friends, that they shared books and a complicity that nobody in the world, not even Señor Ubach, could have imagined.

“One day I told him we were the same,” Victoria confessed.

After the tragic death of the Ubachs in the fire that destroyed their house, Ignacio Sanchís became her legal guardian until she came of age, when he married her. There was a lot of gossip, of course. Some called it the greatest marriage for money of the century.

Victoria smiled bitterly when she heard those words.

“Ignacio Sanchís was never a husband to you, at least not in the way everyone thought he was,” said Leandro. “He was a good man who had discovered the truth and married you to protect you.”

“I loved him.”

“And he loved you. He gave his life for you.”

Victoria sank into a long silence.

“For many years you tried to take justice into your own hands with the help of Ignacio and of Valentín Morgado, who had been in prison with your father and whom your husband hired as a chauffeur for you. Together you forged a plan to lay a trap for Valls, and you managed to capture him. What you didn’t know is that someone was watching you. Someone who couldn’t allow the truth to be disclosed.”