Chapter 5 - Why Alejandro Chose Me
Alejandro agreed to a controlled meeting three months after I cut open the mattress.
Marcus attended.
So did Alejandro’s attorney.
No Carmen.
No shouting.
No possibility of him grabbing my wrist and covering it with flowers afterward.
Alejandro looked tired.
“You think I killed those women.”
“I don’t know what you did.”
“I never killed anyone.”
“Why were their things inside our mattress?”
He looked down.
“My mother stored some of it.”
“Inside a mattress we slept on?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“She didn’t trust banks after one of the property lawsuits.”
“That isn’t an explanation.”
“I know.”
“Marina?”
His face changed.
“My wife.”
There it was.
“Were you still married when you married me?”
“No.”
“Show me a valid divorce.”
“It’s complicated.”
I almost laughed.
“Bigamy is complicated for you. It’s very simple for me.”
His attorney intervened.
Marcus stopped him.
“Let him answer.”
Alejandro rubbed his hands together.
“Marina disappeared. My mother handled the legal termination overseas later.”
“You knew she was declared dead.”
“Yes.”
“Did you believe she was dead?”
A hesitation.
My body went cold.
“When did you learn she wasn’t?”
Alejandro closed his eyes.
“Three years after the fire.”
I stopped breathing.
“She was alive?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know now.”
“What happened when you found her?”
“She wanted nothing to do with us.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
He looked at me.
“I told her I would keep her location from my mother if she signed away the remaining San Marcos interest.”
I stared.
“You blackmailed your supposedly dead wife for her house.”
He flinched.
“I told myself I was solving something.”
“You sound exactly like Carmen.”
That hurt him.
Good.
Then I asked the question that mattered to me personally.
“Did you know who I was before we met?”
“No.”
I waited.
His eyes moved.
“When did you know?”
“Before our second date.”
“How?”
“My mother recognized your last name.”
I felt nauseous.
“What did she say?”
“That Elena Martin caused problems years ago.”
“And you kept dating me.”
“I liked you.”
“You investigated me.”
“Yes.”
“You knew I inherited this house.”
“Yes.”
“You married me.”
“Yes.”
“Then spent eight years trying to move the house into your family companies.”
He looked away.
I understood something then that was worse than learning he never loved me.
He probably had.
“You can love somebody and still be using them,” I said.
Alejandro said nothing.
That became the sentence I remembered most.
He had approached me with information I did not have.
He knew my mother was connected to Marina.
Carmen knew too.
And my house had been their interest from almost the beginning.
Not simply because San Antonio property values had risen.
Because Carmen believed Elena had hidden something here.
That explained the attic “renovations.”
The closet reorganizing.
The constant suggestions to replace old built-ins.
And one more thing.
Alejandro had hated my mother’s old bed frame from the first year of our marriage.
The mattress had changed twice.
The wooden frame had not.
He kept asking me to throw it away.
I always refused.
May you like
That night, I called Marcus.
“I think we’ve been searching the wrong part of the bed.”
