There was a brief pause on the other end. “Everything, sir?”
“Everything,” he repeated.
He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.
Elena Marquez had once been someone people trusted with their lives.
Before the arrest, before the trial that moved too quickly for her to understand what was happening, before the sentence that felt less like a verdict and more like a conclusion already decided, she had been a senior nurse at a public hospital on the outskirts of Veracruz. Not the kind of nurse who did the bare minimum and went home, but the kind who stayed late, who remembered names, who could calm patients without saying much, simply by being present in a way that made fear feel manageable.
She had built her life out of responsibility. Raising her daughter, Sofia, largely on her own after a relationship that had ended more quietly than it had begun, she learned early how to carry more than one burden at a time. There were bills to pay, shifts to cover, a child to protect, and through it all, she maintained something that people often commented on without fully understanding—an ability to remain steady, even when everything around her wasn’t.
