PART 1
“If anyone touches that coffin again before the burial, they will be kicked out of this house.”
That’s what Javier Morales said with a calmness that chilled Don Ernesto’s blood.
But when everyone went downstairs to greet the neighbors arriving with sweet bread, coffee, and wreaths of flowers, the old man disobeyed. He couldn’t. Something in his chest screamed at him to say goodbye to Camila one last time.
Her six-year-old granddaughter was in the living room of the family home in Iztapalapa, surrounded by votive candles, muffled prayers, and murmurs of women saying, “Poor thing, may God have her in his glory.” She had been dressed in a white dress, her hair styled with a pink ribbon, her little hands crossed over her chest.
Don Ernesto approached the coffin with trembling legs.
“My little girl,” he whispered.
Then he saw her.
It wasn’t the shadow of a candle. It wasn’t the imagination of a distraught grandfather. Camila’s chest barely rose, as if each breath cost her her life. Her eyelids trembled. Her parched lips tried to part.
Don Ernesto did not shout.
He put his hands in the coffin and felt like the world was breaking apart around him.
Camila wasn’t settled down like a sleeping child.
She was restrained.
Thin metal clasps pressed her wrists against the satin lining. Her skin was red, marked, bruised. A fresh bruise was visible on one ankle. Her forehead burned with fever, but her legs were ice cold.
That was not a medical error.
That was evil.
With clumsy fingers, Don Ernesto desperately searched for a way to free her. There was a small padlock on each clasp. He checked under the lace, between the lining, until he found a tiny key taped under the coffin cushion, in a place where no one, through their tears, would have thought to look.
He started it.
He opened one lock. Then the other.
As soon as Camila was free, she didn’t cry. She didn’t scream. She clung to her grandfather’s neck with a strength that seemed not that of a sick child, but of someone who had been surviving for far too long.
“Grandpa… I behaved myself… I didn’t say anything…”
Don Ernesto’s vision blurred.
He wrapped her in his black sack and lifted her carefully.
“We’re leaving, my love. No one will ever touch you again.”
Camila buried her face in his shoulder.
“Dad said that if I made noise… it would be worse.”
Downstairs, the front door opened. A man’s voice entered the house, calm, talking on the phone as if he weren’t about to bury his own daughter alive.
It was Javier.
