You get back into the black truck and everything smells like leather, rain, and the lie you have been telling yourself for sixteen years. The driver asks if you want the heater on, but you barely hear him. Your eyes are still trapped on that flash of silver and that impossible blue stone, shining on a girl’s finger like a lighthouse calling you toward a shipwreck you never finished drowning in. You tell him to drive, and your voice comes out calm, the way people sound right before they break.
You sit in the back seat and open your phone, thumbs hovering over old numbers you swore you’d never call again. Letícia’s number has been dead for years, but your body still remembers the ritual: type it, stare at it, delete it. Rain drums the roof in a steady heartbeat, and you realize yours is out of sync. You don’t want to chase the girl, but you also don’t want to let the universe steal her from you twice.
You make one decision, small and viciously precise. You ask your head of security to pull the traffic camera footage from the intersection, not the city’s cameras, yours. Money can’t buy love, but it can buy angles, timestamps, and the direction a barefoot girl takes when she disappears into Paraty’s wet labyrinth. Your driver glances at you again like he can sense a storm forming inside the car, and you give him the only instruction that matters: “Find out where she lives.”
You tell yourself you’re being careful. You tell yourself you’re not going to scare her, not going to drag her into some billionaire nightmare of questions and lawyers and blood tests. But the truth is simpler and uglier: you are terrified that if you wait, she’ll evaporate like every other good thing in your life. You watch the wipers slice the world into clean and dirty halves, and you wonder which side you belong on.
That night, you don’t go back to your mansion overlooking the bay. You go to your office, because offices are where feelings go to be punished into silence. Glass walls, cold lights, assistants who don’t ask personal questions, and a desk that has heard you say “handle it” more times than it has heard you say “I miss her.” You pull up the old file you never deleted, labeled LETÍCIA M. and dated sixteen years ago like a wound that still has stitches in it.
There are photos in the file, the ones you kept even after you burned the rest of your life down. Letícia laughing with flour on her cheek because she insisted on making pão de queijo from scratch even when you could have hired a chef. Letícia in your hoodie, hair in a messy bun, holding the ultrasound photo like it was a ticket to a future she trusted. You stare until your eyes sting, then you scroll to the last thing in the file: the letter she left you.
You could recite it from memory, but you read it anyway, the way people touch bruises just to confirm they’re real. She wrote that she had to go. She wrote that she was sorry. She wrote that you would hate her but that one day you’d understand.
You never understood. You built an empire instead, because empires don’t leave you pregnant and alone.
Your security chief calls at 11:43 p.m. and tells you they found the girl. You don’t say “thank you” like a normal person; you say, “Where?” The address he gives you isn’t a street so much as a description: a narrow lane behind the old church, near the cobblestones that never dry, in a part of town tourists photograph but don’t really see. He adds one detail that makes your throat tighten: “She lives with her mother.”
You stand up so fast your chair squeals. Your body reacts like it has been waiting sixteen years for permission. You look at the mirror in your office window, the reflection of a man in an expensive suit pretending he isn’t about to run into the rain and beg the past to stop running. You whisper her name once, not into the phone, not for anyone else, just to hear if the world still recognizes it: “Letícia.”
You drive there yourself. You don’t bring a convoy, you don’t bring cameras, you don’t bring the kind of noise your name usually drags behind it. You bring only one thing you’ve avoided carrying for years: hope. In the passenger seat, you hold a small velvet box you found in your safe, the twin of the ring you gave her, because you had ordered two back then like an idiot who believed in matching forever.
When you reach the lane, the rain has softened into a mist that clings to your skin like a warning. The houses are close together, painted colors that look cheerful during sunlight and bruised at night. You park, step out, and the world feels too quiet, as if Paraty itself is holding its breath. You walk toward a door that doesn’t belong to your world, and your shoes splash in puddles that reflect street lamps like floating coins.
A window glows faintly. You can see a shadow moving inside, the shape of someone small crossing the room. Your heart trips over itself when you recognize the posture before you recognize the face, because grief becomes fluent in body language. You raise your hand to knock, and for a second you can’t, because knocking means answers, and answers mean consequences.
The door opens before you touch it.
Leave a Comment