the way strangers saw them.
He was a wealthy father who paid on time, showed up on alternate weekends, sent expensive gifts on birthdays, and had somehow not realized that the mother of his children was unraveling.
He and Leticia had divorced two years earlier.
At the beginning, he told himself it was because they wanted different lives.
That was the polished version.
The truth was rougher.
He had spent years building Aguilar Urban Holdings from a small contracting business into a multi-city development company.
He had missed dinners, anniversaries, school events, doctor appointments, and long conversations that mattered more than any contract.
He came home carrying expensive apologies and expected them to count.
Sometimes they did.
Most of the time they didn’t.
Leticia used to say that living with him felt like living beside a train station.
He was always arriving or leaving, always saying just one more project, just one more quarter, just one more deal and then he would slow down.
He never slowed down.
After the divorce, she insisted on keeping the children in the modest house near her mother’s old church because she wanted their lives to stay familiar.
Tomás wanted them in a safer neighborhood, in a larger place, with help.
Leticia heard only judgment.
Their arguments became a pattern.
Money.
Pride.
Resentment.
Control.
He knew she had struggled after Alma was born.
She had periods of heaviness, long silences, days when the world seemed to sit on her chest.
She told him once that some mornings she could not tell whether she was tired or disappearing.
He had urged therapy.
She had gone for a while, then stopped.
He knew she had lost a boutique management job six months after the divorce and later found another one at a salon supply store.
He did not know she had lost that job too.
He did not know the utility notices had been stacking up in a kitchen drawer.
He did not know the school had called twice in the last month because Santiago had been picked up late.
He did not know because he had stopped looking beyond the edges of his own schedule.
That evening, after Santiago was evaluated and found dehydrated but stable, Detective Marín came back with the first pieces of the picture.
Leticia’s neighbors said they hadn’t seen her since Friday afternoon.
One remembered her leaving dressed too carefully for a normal errand, in a blouse she usually saved for nights out.
Another had seen a gray sedan idle at the curb.
A woman from three houses down said she thought she heard a child crying through the wall on Saturday night, but when she knocked, no one answered, and she assumed Leticia had fallen asleep.
Tomás pressed both hands over his face.
The detective continued.
“We requested camera footage from a gas station near the corner.
Your ex-wife left with a man driving a gray sedan at 4:18 p.m.
Friday.
We are working to identify him.”
Tomás looked up.
“A man?”
The detective nodded.
“Do you know anyone she has been seeing?”
Tomás wanted to say no.
Then he remembered the name he had heard once, months earlier, from Leticia’s cousin during a tense birthday party conversation cut short when he walked into the room.
Oscar.
He didn’t have
