Chapter 7 - THE WOMAN USING HELENA'S NAME
The woman in the airport photograph was not my mother.
I knew that before Alessandra enlarged the image. Helena had a broad, warm face and a slight bend in her left little finger from an old childhood injury. This woman was slimmer, younger, and had a narrow chin. Her hair was pinned beneath a hat. But the name on the ticket was Helena Oliveira, and a convincing copy of my mother's identification had been used to purchase it.
“They're trying to make her part of this,” I said.
Alessandra nodded. “That's one possibility. Or someone has been using her identity for years.”
Dante leaned over the laptop. “The pendant is deliberate. They want us to believe the woman has a personal connection to Rosa.”
Bruno made a call to the airline's legal department while Alessandra filed a request for the original booking documents. I could feel my anger sharpening into something steadier than panic.
“Ask Helena where she was,” I said. “She may have records.”
At nine the next morning my mother opened her old biscuit tin and laid its contents on her table. Inside were receipts, hospital appointment cards, and a bus ticket from the day of the supposed airport departure. Helena had been receiving postoperative care in São Paulo. A physician's entry confirmed the visit, and another patient remembered sitting beside her.
“Who would use my name?” Helena asked.
“Someone who wanted a trail leading to you,” I replied.
She looked at the locket around my neck. “The truth isn't enough for them to hide anymore. They need new lies.”
The next lie arrived by lunchtime. A celebrity news site published a story claiming a housemaid had fabricated a secret family relationship to gain control of a fortune. It referred to an anonymous source within the Montenegro organization and described Helena as an alleged beneficiary of suspicious payments. They used a photograph of me taken in my uniform before the attack.
I stared at the article until the letters blurred.
“They're calling me a liar.”
Helena set down her tea. “The people who know you won't believe it.”
“But the people who don't know me will.”
She squeezed my hand. “Some will. You can't spend your life correcting every stranger.”
I wanted to be that wise. Instead I locked myself in the bathroom and cried until my wound hurt.
When I came out, Rosa had left a voicemail. She didn't offer to fix the scandal. She simply said she'd been called a liar before and would testify publicly if necessary. “Not because you're helpless,” she added, “but because I'm the one who knows what happened.”
That distinction made it easier to breathe.
Alessandra traced the leaked information to a firm that had recently worked for Fenix Holdings. The story was already being challenged with a carefully worded correction request. She warned us not to answer speculation with details that might endanger witnesses.
“We'll win with records,” she said, “not with the loudest interview.”
That evening she brought me another fact. A technician had compared the airport photograph with employment records from the private clinic associated with Caio's final investigation. The woman appeared to be Elisa Duarte, a former records coordinator. Elisa had left the clinic abruptly after Caio died. She was also related by marriage to Álvaro Cruz.
“Can we question her?” I asked.
“The police are trying to locate her. She is represented by a lawyer now.”
“Does Dante know her?”
“He remembers her from his mother's old medical records.”
I looked up. “Rosa's?”
“Yes. The clinic kept paperwork from the period after the fire. Some of those records appear to have been modified.”
A strange thought occurred to me. “What if the poison investigation and Rosa's disappearance aren't separate cases at all?”
Alessandra gave me a careful look. “That is what we are testing. Not what we can yet prove.”
The next day I attended a voluntary interview with investigators. They asked me to describe the night I was attacked: the scent of damp stone in the wine room, the man's gray coat, his voice, the knife, and how I escaped. They asked whether I could distinguish what I had seen from what I had learned afterward. I did my best. At the end I said that I didn't want to guess just because guessing might help Dante.
The officer nodded. “That's exactly right.”
I had expected a room full of suspicion. Instead I encountered a process that moved slowly because words needed to mean what they said. It wasn't comforting, exactly, but it was fairer than the rules I'd lived by in the mansion.
After the interview, Dante was waiting outside with Rosa. She had decided to give her own statement that day. They looked awkward together, like distant relatives meeting after a funeral.
“We thought we'd walk by the park,” Dante said. “Would you join us?”
I studied both of them. “Only if we get ice cream.”
Rosa smiled. “I'm buying.”
We walked in a public garden near the station. There were pigeons, children on scooters, and a fountain that sprayed water into the wind. Rosa asked me about my favorite meal as a child. I told her Helena made rice pudding on rainy nights. Dante remembered Rosa's orange marmalade, which she said was awful until her third attempt.
I listened to them trade memories and felt both included and left out. They had eleven years together before I was born. I had twenty-five years with Helena that Rosa would never know. No amount of truth could turn those separate lives into one continuous family.
“I don't think we get back the time,” I said suddenly.
Rosa stopped walking. “No.”
“Then what are we supposed to do?”
“Stop losing more of it,” Dante said.
I took a bite of melting ice cream. It wasn't a grand answer, but it was one I could use.
Later, at Rosa's protected residence, she showed me a box of unsent letters. There was one for each of my birthdays until I turned eighteen. Some were a few lines, others several pages. One described a stray cat that had followed her home. Another wondered if I liked mathematics. Most ended with the same sentence: I hope you are free to become yourself.
“Why did you stop at eighteen?” I asked.
“Because I realized I was writing to a child who no longer existed,” she said. “You were a grown woman, and I knew nothing about you. That was painful to admit.”
I read the letter dated on my tenth birthday. She had written that she imagined me laughing loudly, because Dante had laughed that way at the same age. It made me smile. Helena used to tell me I laughed like a truck starting on a cold morning.
I put the letter down. “I'd like to keep copies.”
“You can have the originals.”
“Not yet. I don't want them all at once.”
Rosa nodded. “Then one at a time.”
At dusk, Bruno called Dante. Elisa Duarte had contacted prosecutors through her attorney. She offered to speak about falsified records in exchange for protective measures and consideration of her own role. Her preliminary account implicated Álvaro Cruz in creating medical paperwork under Helena's name. She also said Vicente's office received copies of those records long before Caio's death.
“What did she do for them?” Dante asked.
Bruno hesitated. “She signed intake forms and processed payments. She says she was told the names were aliases used to protect patients, then realized the records were designed to redirect investigators.”
“Can she identify the person who attacked Marina?”
“Possibly. She's seen Leandro Pires with the Cruz team.”
I leaned against a garden wall, suddenly exhausted. I wanted the case to be finished. I wanted an ordinary night with a book and a bowl of soup. But Elisa's statement brought one more terrible fact.
“There's an internal memo,” Bruno said. “It describes Caio as a risk because he discovered the child.”
“Me,” I whispered.
“Yes.”
Dante closed his eyes.
“The memo was dated the morning of his last dinner,” Bruno continued. “And it includes a handwritten instruction to bring him to a meeting at the clinic afterward.”
Dante opened his eyes. “So the meal wasn't necessarily where he was harmed.”
“That's what the investigators are examining.”
I thought of the night Caio died, the panic, the untouched dishes, and Dante refusing to eat. The poison had made every cook a suspect while the men who arranged the meeting remained invisible.
“Who signed the memo?” I asked.
Bruno swallowed. “Álvaro Cruz.”
Rosa lowered herself into a chair. “Then Ana was right about him from the beginning.”
For a long time the three of us stayed together in the quiet garden. The sun went down behind the buildings. Somewhere a dog barked. Then my phone buzzed with a message from Helena: she had made too much soup and wanted to know if we were hungry.
I showed it to Dante and Rosa. He said yes immediately. Rosa asked whether she was welcome.
I looked at her, then at the letters in her lap.
May you like
“Yes,” I said. “Come and have dinner with us.”
No one had to taste the food to prove it was safe. That felt like a victory I could hold in my hands.
