“Then we have to help him,” he said.
“That’s something for grown-ups,” Celia tried to stop her.
But Carolina had already learned something that rich and poor adults too easily forget: that an invisible girl can walk anywhere without anyone noticing her.
The next day, taking advantage of the fact that she sometimes accompanied her mother to pick her up, Carolina began to hang around the building. She would sit in the lobby pretending to wait, walk slowly through the hallways, and approach half-open doors with an old telephone that a former employer had given Celia and that still recorded even though the screen was cracked. No one suspected her. To the men in suits, she was just a poor girl passing through, an insignificant burden.
That’s how he recorded them.
Voices. Names. Amounts. Photos of haphazardly arranged documents. Printed transfer slips on the desk. Conversations where Alfonso talked about accounts, signatures, about “taking him down before he recovers.” Carolina didn’t understand everything, but she knew when someone was planning something bad. And for four days she dedicated herself to gathering evidence with a patience beyond her years.
When she thought she had had enough, she asked Celia to take her to Robert’s house.
Mary opened the door. Her face looked different. She was still beautiful, but she no longer looked flawless. She looked human. Tired. Scared. Luna appeared behind her, and upon seeing Carolina, she smiled immediately for the first time in days.
“Carolina,” said Robert, coming down the stairs. “What are you doing here?”
The girl entered with the seriousness of someone who knows she’s not going to say anything foolish. She placed a folder on the dining room table and then put her cell phone down as well.
—There’s a man in your company who wants to steal everything from you.
Robert frowned. Mary approached. Alfonso was the man she trusted most within the company. Or so she thought.
Carolina opened the folder. Inside were printed sheets that Celia had helped her organize, notes with dates and times, and her cell phone ready to play audio recordings.
The first recording began to play.
Alfonso’s voice filled the dining room with monstrous clarity.
