“WHERE DID YOU GET THIS NECKLACE? IT BELONGED TO MY DAUGHTER,” THE BILLIONAIRE SAID… BUT HE TURNED PALE AT THE ANSWER.
The girl took a step back, frightened, but she didn’t run.
“Is the girl okay?” she asked first, her voice strangely firm for someone so small. “Are you looking for a girl?”
Mary felt her legs almost buckle.
“Where is my daughter?” she sobbed, clutching his shoulders. “Where is Luna? Tell me where she is!”
The girl swallowed. Her eyes moistened, but she held his gaze.
—She’s at my house. I found her crying. She didn’t want to come back with you.
Silence fell upon the three of them like a wall.
Robert, who for years had been the man who signed multimillion-dollar contracts without batting an eye, felt something inside his chest shatter with a sound no one else could hear. Robert owned one of the country’s largest construction companies, a businessman who appeared in business magazines, who lived with his wife Mary Escalante—a famous, admired, impeccable architect—in a 1,000-square-meter residence in Bosques de las Lomas, with chauffeurs, domestic staff, a heated pool, and watches that cost more than most people’s homes. But his daughter had spent years eating alone, waiting alone at school, and asleep when they finally entered her room to kiss her forehead with a guilty look, phone in hand.
And on Thursday, Luna simply disappeared.
The police had shaken half . Patrol cars, drones, news reports, cameras stationed in front of the house, interviews, experts, theories. But the answer hadn’t been in any sophisticated strategy, but rather in front of an old tomb, with childlike eyes and an impossible necklace.
“Take us to her,” Robert said, and for the first time in a long time he sounded more like a man than a businessman.
The girl nodded. Her name was Carolina. She was 10 years old and lived with her mother, Celia, in a small house made of wood and corrugated metal on the other side of the neighborhood, near a ditch where people dumped construction debris. She collected cans at the cemetery and in the streets to help with expenses. When she took them to her house, Robert and Mary felt such a thick shame that they almost couldn’t bring themselves to go inside.
