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Mariana suddenly raised her head.
—Do you know him?
“Yes,” the doctor said. “Samuel Ortega. He’s been coming with the girl for months. He never misses a treatment. He always arrives late from work, exhausted, but he comes. He asked questions, took notes, and even learned to clean the wound because he didn’t have money for a nurse.”
That information clashed head-on with the digital chorus that was already calling Samuel a monster in neighborhood groups.
Mariana asked to review the medical history and what she found forced her to sit down.
Lupita had undergone surgery eleven days earlier for an intestinal perforation resulting from complicated appendicitis that almost killed her because she arrived late to the hospital.
From then on he needed expensive antibiotics, daily treatments and a special diet impossible to sustain for someone who lived paycheck to paycheck.
Samuel had signed every consent form, had asked for payment plans, had left his watch as a guarantee at the pharmacy, and had begged for discounts that were not always granted.
None of that resembled the story of the man who runs away.
Everything, instead, resembled the story of the man too poor to fail and too lonely to rest.
While the girl slept connected to the IV drip, Rodrigo, the 911 operator, called the hospital to ask about her, something he didn’t always do, but that voice had stirred something deep within him.
Mariana told him the basics, and he remained silent for a few seconds before saying that the girl’s phrase had not left him at ease.
—“Dad says it’s love, but it hurt,” he repeated. “People are already making a monster out of it.”
“Well, maybe he wasn’t the monster,” Mariana replied, looking at the medical file. “Maybe the monster was poverty.”
By the next morning, the entire neighborhood had already invented a complete version.
Samuel was an alcoholic, some said.
Samuel had another wife, others swore.
Samuel had left because he couldn’t stand the sick girl, several people claimed with the obscene ease of those who narrate without knowing.
The most shared post said that “what was happening in that house was finally being revealed,” and the same people who had never knocked on the door to offer soup were now offering opinions as if they were helping.
Doña Graciela, who in life had asked Samuel for sugar more times than she could count, cried in front of the camera saying that “she always suspected that something was not right.”
I hadn’t suspected it.
Only now did I want to avoid appearing indifferent.
At the Jacarandas house, Mariana returned with a basic inspection order and a forensic photographer, because there were details she no longer wanted to leave to rumor.
The house began to speak more clearly when no one interrupted it with borrowed morals.