Chapter 7 - The Valuation
The hallway was empty.
Mariana stepped outside first.
I followed.
The bank corridor was silent.
No stranger.
No footsteps.
Nothing.
Mariana looked at me.
“Maybe I was wrong.”
“About what?”
She shook her head.
“Forget it.”
But I couldn't.
The name Rafael stayed in my mind.
That evening, I returned to Teresa's house.
For the first time, it no longer felt like home.
It felt like a place filled with questions.
Mariana had inherited it.
I had no legal claim.
Yet the house was where Teresa had raised me into someone I barely recognized.
I walked through the rooms slowly.
The kitchen.
The living room.
The workshop.
Her bedroom.
Then I noticed something behind the bookshelf.
A loose wooden panel.
I pulled it.
A narrow compartment opened.
Inside was another envelope.
My name was written on it.
I sat on the floor.
The letter began:
“You probably think the house was the prize.”
I stopped.
Then continued.
“It never was.”
Teresa explained that the property was valuable, but the true reason she had kept certain documents was connected to her husband's death.
He had not simply died from illness.
He had spent months under stress because someone had threatened the family.
Teresa had never told me.
She wrote that Rafael had once attempted to purchase their business through intimidation.
When Teresa refused, Rafael disappeared.
But years later, after her husband died, someone began asking questions about the house.
Teresa believed the old dispute had never ended.
I stared at the page.
Then I heard a sound outside.
A car door.
I stood.
The street was dark.
A black sedan was parked across from the house.
No one got out.
I watched for several minutes.
Then the car drove away.
The next morning, Mariana called.
“You need to come to the house.”
“Why?”
“I found something.”
When I arrived, she was standing beside Teresa's desk.
She held a folder.
Inside was the original property valuation.
The number was different from the one Teresa had shown me.
Much higher.
Mariana looked at me.
“Why did she hide this?”
“I don't know.”
She opened another file.
It contained bank records.
Charitable donations.
Private accounts.
Payments to people I had never heard of.
Then she found a receipt.
A large amount of money had been transferred to a legal firm three weeks before Teresa died.
“For what?” I asked.
Mariana shook her head.
“I don't know.”
We called the lawyer.
He refused to discuss it without authorization.
But he did say one thing.
“Your aunt prepared everything.”
“What everything?”
“She told me that if something happened, you would come looking.”
Mariana stared at me.
“Why would she expect him?”
The lawyer paused.
Then said:
“Because she believed he was the only person who could finish what she started.”
The line went dead.
Neither of us spoke.
I looked at the documents again.
For six years, I had thought Teresa had been testing whether I wanted her money.
Now I wondered whether she had been preparing me for something else.
That night, I found another letter beneath the mattress in my old room.
It was short.
“Six years ago, you came into my life because you wanted my house.”
My hands trembled.
“You stayed because you learned how to build something of your own.”
Then the final line:
“But there is one thing you still don't know about the day we first met.”
The letter ended there.
May you like
And underneath it was a photograph of the pharmacy.
Taken from across the street.
