He removes his spectacles and pinches the bridge of his nose. Chaotic stacks of paper flank him from all sides. They were already there when we entered, piling up and up and up during the family’s period of mourning. There is no respect for the dead, not where money is concerned. The Sonza family’s wealth is old, but Kiki explained to me once how it continues to grow, stacks of gold and silver multiplying like fertile beasts. They control several very important shipping routes between Spain and the New World, and people apparently pay for the right to use them. How a man can control great big chunks of ocean is not something I will ever understand. The sea is not property, and yet they have carved it up like a prize pig being led to slaughter.

Don Carlos hasn’t paid me much attention since the night Alejandro died, but I’ve been watching him, same as I’ve been watching Kiki. She is my family, and so is he. I’ve watched him attempt to sift through the reports of shipping routes and supply manifests. His eyes hardly move. A single page will remain atop a pile for days with nary a signature in sight.

“What am I looking at?” His voice is as hollow as the rest of him. He’s looking at the papers, but he isn’t really seeing them. When Kiki first slammed the stack of letters onto his desk, he’d reached for them, instinctively. But his fingers had barely grazed the one on top when his brain seemingly caught up. His son’s handwriting, slashed across the page. A sign of a life no more.

“We found these in Alejandro’s room,” Kiki explains. “They were love letters, some of them, but there was also other correspondence with the same person. We think he knew something, was trying to warn her—”

“Warn who? Of what? Kiki, this is nonsense—”

“It’s proof, Papa!”

Her shout bounces off the dark wooden walls.

He looks up, eyes blinking slowly, like he’s trying to see us through a great fog. “Proof? Of what?”

Kiki leans forward, bracing her hands on his desk, looming over the old man in a way that makes my stomach hurt. He is suffering. I know despair when I see it. He’s too deep into his own pain to be able to see outside of it.

This is a mistake. I reach out to Kiki, laying a hand on her arm, but she surges forth like she doesn’t even feel it.

“Alejandro didn’t commit suicide.”

Each word makes her father flinch as if she had reached across the desk to strike him.

“Eustaquia—”

“He was killed, Papa.”