PART 2
That afternoon the heat inside the house became unbearable. Without water, without food, and with no way out, Jimena felt the fear stop feeling like fear and turn into something else: a dry coldness, an inner voice telling her that if she did not do something immediately, Mateo was not going to make it.
She laid him on the couch and searched every corner, every drawer, every piece of furniture again. She found a cup with a little forgotten water on the nightstand, a few broken crackers, nothing else. She tried using apps to ask for help, but almost all of them required phone verification. The old dusty landline in the corner of the living room gave her only dead silence. Santiago had cut that too.
This had not been an outburst.
It had been a plan.
Mateo started getting hot as the afternoon wore on. First red cheeks. Then dull eyes. Then the little body restless, sticky with fever. Jimena held him, sang to him, dampened his forehead with the last drops she found in the bathroom, and felt something fierce rise inside her. She no longer cared about breaking things, screaming, causing a scandal for the whole neighborhood.
She grabbed the golf club and began smashing the glass of the living room window.
She hit it once, twice, ten times. Glass flew all over the floor. She screamed until her throat tore.
“Help! Please! There’s a child here! We’ve been locked in!”
At first no one answered. Only the distant barking of a dog and the hum of the sun falling over the walls. She kept screaming until her voice became a raw thread. And then she heard a car brake in front of the gate.
Jimena ran toward the shattered opening and froze.
It was not a patrol car. It was not an ambulance.
It was Teresa.
Her mother-in-law.
She got out of the car with a sledgehammer in her hand.
Jimena’s first reaction was to think that she was involved too. That she had come to complete her son’s cruelty. But Teresa looked up, saw her bleeding behind the broken glass, saw Mateo lying on the couch with his face burning from fever… and her expression collapsed completely.
She did not look like an accomplice.
She looked like a terrified woman.
She struck the padlock on the gate until it burst open, crossed the yard almost running, and when she saw the state of the house, she let out a scream Jimena had never heard from her.
“Santiago, you damned bastard!”
She went straight to the front door and began smashing the hinges with the sledgehammer. Each blow echoed as if she were demolishing entire years of silence. On the twelfth strike, the door gave way. Teresa rushed inside, dropped the tool, and took Mateo into her arms.
“He’s burning up…” she whispered, her voice broken. “My God… he’s burning up.”
They left immediately for the children’s hospital. Jimena rode in the back, holding her son, too weak to ask questions. But on the way, Teresa made several frantic calls.
“Tell Toño I got them out… yes, confirm the location… no, don’t transfer anything yet… listen to me carefully, not one peso until the police get there.”
Jimena looked up.
“Anything? Whose location?”
Teresa gripped the steering wheel so hard her knuckles turned white.
“Your husband is not on a business trip,” she finally said. “He’s in deep with a woman and with very dangerous people.”
In the emergency room, while the doctors treated Mateo for dehydration and fever, Teresa told her what she had been hiding for two months. She had noticed Santiago’s change ever since Verónica reappeared. Distrusting him, she asked her cousin Toño, a former police officer turned private investigator, for help. They put a tracker on the car. They checked bank movements. They recorded conversations.
And what they found was worse than simple infidelity.
Verónica had not returned for love. She was part of a network that hunted wealthy men, drew them into clandestine gambling, got them into debt, and then bled them dry. Santiago had been taking money out in small amounts for weeks. He had emptied savings. He had tried to mortgage the house. And that very morning, instead of driving to the airport, he had gone straight to a resort on the coast where an illegal casino was operating.
He had lost everything.
And now they were holding him to demand three hundred thousand dollars.
Jimena stared at Teresa, unable to breathe. Everything fit: the confinement, the food removed, the water shut off, the dead line. Santiago had not wanted anyone to interrupt him while he sank with his lover.
Then Teresa’s phone rang. She listened for a few seconds and went pale.
“They found Santiago… but he’s not alone. Verónica just called. They want the money now.”
And in that instant, Jimena understood that the worst part of the truth still had not come to light.
