“Do you know her well enough to swear she didn’t kill a baby?” Camila asked.
—Lower your voice and don’t talk to anyone without a lawyer.
Therein lay the truth. Not in a confession, but in the reflection. Instead of pain, strategy emerged. Instead of horror, calculation.
“Be very careful about what you hid from me, Esteban,” Camila said, trembling with rage. “Because if I find out you knew anything, I’m going to tear your life apart piece by piece.”
He hung up.
Camila didn’t sleep. Around 3 a.m., she took an old box from the closet. Inside were Gael’s hat, a ribbon from the funeral, condolence notes she’d never been able to read completely, and hospital papers. Looking through it without thinking, she found a crumpled parking receipt from San Jerónimo Hospital. The date matched the night her son died. His car had left at 11:11 p.m. But below it was another license plate number, handwritten due to a machine malfunction. She recognized the last four digits immediately.
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Esteban’s car.
She froze.
He always said he’d left the hospital around 8:00 to get some sleep before an important meeting. She believed him because in those days she could no longer distinguish truth from her own exhaustion. But his car was still there almost at midnight.
The next morning, he was at the police station handing over the receipt in a clear plastic bag. Ibarra ordered the review of old security camera footage from the parking lot. Hours later, they showed him the recording: Esteban’s car entering at 10:39 p.m., and, on another camera, a man of his build meeting with a woman in medical scrubs on staircase B. Although the image was poor, the woman was Renata. They were arguing. Esteban was holding her arm. She pulled away and pointed angrily at his chest.
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“He knew I was there,” Camila said, with a clarity that was frightening.
Ibarra did not contradict her this time.
Esteban was interrogated that same day. Camila watched him through the tinted glass of an adjoining room. He arrived impeccably dressed in a navy suit, the kind of man who still thinks he’s more convincing because he wears nice shoes. In person, he still possessed that handsomeness so many mistook for decency. But when they showed him the video of Renata being admitted to intensive care, he didn’t react like someone witnessing the impossible. He reacted like someone seeing a disaster he’d been dreading for years.
First he lied. He said he must have misremembered the time. He said Renata went to the hospital about donations. He said he’d forgotten about that encounter on the stairs. Then the prosecutor showed him the video of the poisoning. Esteban clenched his jaw and lowered his gaze. He wasn’t surprised. He was cornered.
“Renata was very upset that night,” he murmured. “She said that losing the child would destroy me.”
The prosecutor fixed her eyes on him.
—Lose the child?
Esteban realized too late what he had blurted out.
His lawyer asked to end the interview. But it was too late.
With a court order, they searched Esteban and Renata’s house in Puerta de Hierro. They seized laptops, old cell phones, boxes of files, and bank statements. What they found was worse than Camila had imagined. There were emails between them dating back 10 months before Gael’s birth. The affair had begun while she was still pregnant. They also found searches related to neonatal toxicology, lethal doses for newborns, and even documents from a law firm analyzing the financial impact of a divorce with a living child and future alimony payments.
Renata didn’t just want Esteban. She wanted her life free. No baby. No wife. No responsibilities. No divided inheritances.
Then another sordid detail emerged: Esteban had doubted Gael’s paternity. Renata had planted that idea in his head for months, taking advantage of a slight discrepancy in preliminary data that was later clarified, but which he chose to believe because it suited him. The prosecutor showed Camila a partially recovered email where Renata wrote: “If that child survives, she’ll have you tied down forever.”
Camila read the sentence 3 times.
All the hatred Esteban hurled at his “defective genes” wasn’t born solely from grief. It was also festering with suspicion, infidelity, and cowardice.
When Renata was arrested, the press went wild. News websites, morning shows, gossip magazines: everyone wanted the scandal of the perfect couple turned national nightmare. The elegant woman who poisoned a newborn. The businessman who blamed his ex-wife while hiding an affair. And the hospital, of course, began to unravel when an accounting audit uncovered under-the-table payments to an administrator who altered the medical record, erased a toxicology order, and left the case sealed as a natural death.
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