He breathed out slowly, the way people do when they’re trying to decide between apology and self-pity and are too selfish to fully commit to either. “Do you hate me?”
That one surprised you.
Not because the answer was difficult. Because it revealed how small his imagination still was. Diego thought the opposite of possession was hatred. He still did not understand that the cruelest thing you could one day become to him was irrelevant.
“No,” you said. “I know you too well for that.”
And for the first time since you met him, he had no response.
The apartment sold in late spring.
Not for what Diego once bragged it would fetch, not after the refinance issue, the legal notices, the lender pressure, and the general stink of litigation attached to unit 14C. By then the place had become a mausoleum for his fantasies anyway. The sale proceeds first satisfied the lender dispute, then the traced portion of your inheritance claim, then legal fees, then a stack of obligations Diego had spent months pretending were negotiable if he just looked wounded enough.
Doña Teresa cried in the hallway the day the movers came.
You were not there, but Aaron the building manager told Rebecca’s clerk, and Rebecca told you over lunch with the pleased neutrality of a woman narrating weather. Apparently Teresa had brought one last roll of beige swatches with her, as if fabric might still bargain with foreclosure. Diego stood in the emptied living room while they carried out the couch, the television, and the dining table he once claimed you had never truly paid for. In the end, even his tools left in inventory bags.
There was no home for Valeria to inherit.
Months later, during the sentencing phase on the state fraud charges, Diego looked older than his age and smaller than his tailoring. The prosecutor was not dramatic. That was what made her devastating. She laid out the numbers, the signatures, the timing, the deliberate use of marital trust as a business shield and personal expense account. She called it sustained deception with financial exploitation features.
You sat in the second row and listened.
