You place the blue folder on the polished mahogany table with a calm hand, and that calm is what unsettles everyone first.
Not the folder itself.
Not the timing.
Not even the smile on your face, small and precise as the edge of a letter opener. No, what shakes the room is that you do not look broken. You do not look like the grieving widow humiliated one final time by a dead man’s last cruelty. You look composed. Worse than composed. Prepared.
Across from you, Ximena Ávila’s triumphant expression flickers for only half a second, but you catch it. You catch everything these days. That is one of the gifts betrayal gives if it doesn’t kill you first. It burns away the need to look away.
