Aitana
The footsteps stopped just outside the entrance. They were not the careless footsteps of someone wandering off a trail or stumbling through unfamiliar ground. They were slow and deliberate, placed with the specific care of someone who knew exactly where they were going and had already considered whether they wanted to arrive.
Aitana pressed herself against the back wall of the root cellar and held the metal box against her chest with both arms. The damp earth was cold through the knees of her jeans. Her heartbeat was doing something it had not done in eleven years, not the controlled, managed fear of a woman who had survived incarceration by reducing every emotion to its most functional form, but something rawer than that.
Something that belonged to the girl she had been before all of it. The girl who had trusted people. She stayed completely still.
The entrance to the cellar was a low, arched opening cut into a hillside on what had once been her grandfather’s property, a piece of land in the high desert outside Tucson that Don Teodoro Ruelas had worked for forty years and left, in theory, to his family. The gray light of late afternoon made a rectangle at the opening just bright enough to silhouette the figure stepping through. A man’s shape.
Moving carefully. She saw his face. “Don’t open it,” said a voice she knew, rough with age and something else.
“If you found that box, you’ve already started something you may not be able to stop.”
His name was Jacinto Ruelas. Her grandfather’s foreman for twenty-three years. A man who had carried her on his shoulders at the county fair when she was six years old and cried openly, without shame, at Don Teodoro’s funeral.
He was older now, more bent at the spine, his beard gone gray at the edges, but she would have known him anywhere. He was looking at the box the way a person looks at something they have been watching from a distance for a very long time. “How did you know I was here?” Aitana asked, getting to her feet.
Jacinto turned his hat in his hands. He looked at the box. Then at her.
“Because I’ve been coming up here for years,” he said. “Checking that it was still buried.”
The cold she felt had nothing to do with the temperature of the cellar. “What is this?” she said.
He took a long breath. “The truth,” he said. “The one that cost you eleven years.”
To understand why she was in that cellar at all, you have to go back six days, to the morning she walked out of the correctional facility’s front gate for the first time since she was twenty-seven years old.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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