Elisa crossed her arms.
“I knew Angélica would do right by me. I heard her speak to our father a few days before he passed and she told him that they needed to find me, that it would be fair that I received part of the inheritance. She remembered me as a little girl, and how her mother had kicked me and my mother out of the hacienda. She knew it was unfair and I deserved a part of the money, too. Our father agreed, but he died before he could speak to Mr. Aquilino about it.” She turned to me, her eyes brimming. “But you would’ve never understood anything. You would come here and collect all the money and all the land you didn’t deserve. You were never here for our father, you didn’t tend to him when he was dying like we did. You didn’t clean his vomit, or his dirty sheets, or give the injections he needed. And yet, he loved you so, he never stopped talking about you.”
“I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me who you were,” Angélica said.
“Because you were so upset about Purificación that I thought you might send me away, too. I wanted to fix things for you, for all of us.” She appealed to her other siblings. “Don’t you think it’s unfair that our father would leave almost everything to this woman, to this . . . this person that we hadn’t even met before?”
Neither Alberto nor Catalina would look her in the eye.
“The irony of it all was that my grandfather was also a Spaniard,” Elisa said, facing me again. “He’d been my grandmother’s patrón at another finca. So I guess history repeated itself. My father loved you the most because of your European blood, but I had it, too.”
Everyone stood in tense silence. Aquilino broke it.
“What you did was very serious,” he told Elisa in that somber voice of his. “A crime.”
Elisa reached out to Angélica. “Hermana? ”
“I’m afraid I will have to contact the authorities, se?orita,” Aquilino said.
Angélica removed her arm from Elisa’s grasp.
Elisa fixed her eyes on me with a hatred that made me shiver. “Why did you have to come? Nobody wanted you here. Nobody.”
I looked at the faces around me. Nobody said anything.
“This is all your fault!” Elisa came at me with a strength that I never imagined she could possess. I fell hard on the floor. Elisa raised her hand, but before she could hit me, Alberto restrained her arms.
“Calm down!” he told her.
I came to my feet, dusting my trousers with my hands, and gave one last glance to my father’s portrait before walking out of the room.
CHAPTER 41
I didn’t bother going back to my bedroom. I needed to get out of the hacienda immediately.
But there weren’t a lot of places to go. I didn’t want to go to Martin’s house or to Vinces, either; it was too long of a walk. There was one more option, though not ideal.
I headed toward the creek. I needed to think about what had just happened. I needed to understand what I was feeling, to put my thoughts in order. A tingling sensation ran through my body, energizing me. I had an urge to break something.
Things had not gone as I expected them to at all.
But what had I been expecting? Welcome hugs? Tears?
Not after my deception.
“Nobody wanted you here. Nobody.”
Elisa’s words kept ringing in my mind.
None of them had denied what she’d said. They weren’t even mildly relieved that I was still alive. Though I understood their surprise and shock, their coldness hurt. It reminded me that I didn’t mean anything to them, that they didn’t know me. They only knew the fa?ade of Cristóbal.
And that was my own fault.
Not even Catalina seemed pleased. And I thought she genuinely liked me.
I didn’t stop until I reached the neighbor’s house.
Don Fernando stopped cold when he saw me sitting in his parlor in men’s clothing but without looking particularly masculine with no facial hair or spectacles.
“Se?or . . . ?”
“Se?ora,” I said. “I’m María Purificación de Lafont y Toledo, Don Armand’s oldest daughter.”
Such was his shock that instead of shaking my hand, he sat on the couch, gaping.
“But I thought Do?a Purificación passed away. At least that was the rumor around town.”
I shook my head.
“Wait, weren’t you supposed to be her husband?”
I explained to him, as succinctly as I could, the entire situation. By the end, he had an amused expression on his face that I didn’t particularly care for. Still, I proposed a deal to him. If he let me stay in his house while the inheritance was being processed and distributed, I would renegotiate with him, in more favorable terms, the border issue that had caused such a headache for him and my father. My siblings might not be happy with the agreement, but it was about time that I started making decisions regarding the plantation—it was what my father had wanted. And maybe he had a good reason for it.
Don Fernando looked at me with apprehension, but after a moment, he smiled.
“All right, you have a deal, Do?a Puri.”
“One more thing,” I said, before shaking hands with him. “I’ll need you to send one of your employees to collect all my things from my father’s hacienda. I don’t want to set foot there until this is all over.”
*