If there were a prize for stupidity, I would’ve won it. Here I thought I’d been fooling everyone around me, but the only fool was me.
“Should I call you María Purificación or do you go by Puri, like the plantation?” Martin said.
I swallowed.
“Puri.”
I removed Cristóbal’s spectacles and massaged the bridge of my nose. “Did you know all along?”
“I suspected it from the first day when you climbed on Pacha. Women’s hips are noticeable on horseback.”
Of course, what a dunce I’d been.
“But I confirmed it last night when I heard you singing and swimming in the creek.”
Singing? I covered my mouth. I hadn’t realized I was singing.
“Did you . . . see me, too?” I said in my normal tone of voice.
“Yes. I saw you.” He barely moved a muscle.
I averted my gaze. He’d seen me naked, which was even worse than hearing my atrocious singing. My cheeks burned.
“You could’ve at least spared me the shame of making a fool of myself today,” I said.
“I guess I could have said something, but I wasn’t sure I’d been fully awake last night. I may have had a little too much puro.”
All along he’d suspected me. I wondered if others in the family had, too. I wanted to scream.
“So that trip to the bar, the prostitutes? Were you testing me?”
“Not exactly. Like I said, I wasn’t sure what to think of you. You were convincing otherwise.”
Well, at least that. I would’ve hated for everyone to be laughing behind my back. In a way, I was relieved Martin had found out. That meant no more trips to bars and brothels and faking that I was a “real man,” though I couldn’t deny the outings with Martin were more entertaining than I would’ve expected.
“Did you tell anyone your suspicions?”
“No.” He leaned over the kitchen counter, arms folded in front of his chest. “You want to tell me what happened? Why are you pretending to be your husband?”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to trust him, but I didn’t have a lot of options. He’d already discovered me. The best I could do was tell him the truth in the hopes that he wasn’t implicated in Cristóbal’s death and that instead, he could shed some light on my family and who might have done this.
I started from the beginning: the day I received the letter from the lawyer, back in Sevilla. I’d had another miscarriage a couple of months prior and was eager to leave all the heartbreak behind. The irony was that I really wasn’t as unhappy then as I believed.
True heartbreak still awaited.
Was I making the biggest mistake of my life by confessing to Martin? Perhaps the time had come to confront my sisters and my brother, no saint himself. Was that why he’d been so preoccupied with thoughts about goodness being innate or learned?
Martin nodded, pouring me another shot to loosen my tongue. As I needed all the courage I could, I drank. And talked.
“I know your sisters weren’t happy with the will,” he said as I neared the end of my story. “But from there to wanting to kill you seems somewhat farfetched.”
“Then how do you explain the assassin on the ship?”
“A mistake?”
“What about the check and the note with my name I found among his things?”
“I know Angélica has many defects: she’s vain, arrogant, and ambitious, but she’s not a murderer. And Catalina, well, she’s a saint.”
“She’s not a saint. She’s a human being with flaws like everybody else. But if you think so highly of Angélica then what did you mean when you told the neighbor—Fernando del Río, right?—that he should know better than anyone who Angélica was?”
“That has nothing to do with her moral character. A few years ago, before Angélica married Laurent, Del Río asked for her hand in marriage. Don Armand considered it for a while as a partnership between the two men and joining both haciendas would’ve meant owning the largest plantation in the region, but Angélica declined. Del Río could never forgive Angélica for rejecting him. After that, the Frenchman came along and she married him instead. Del Río and”—he hesitated—“your father had a strained relationship ever since.”
“I heard something about the creek.”
“Yes, the damned creek.”
“And now Angélica is suing him.”
He nodded. Under different circumstances, I would admire my sister’s audacity to behave as she wanted in spite of what our father, or anybody else, desired. But not when it could also mean that she would hurt her own sister to get her way.