At night, in the tiny room they had assigned me, I wrote everything down in a notebook—dates, times, scattered words.

From time to time, Ernesto called me from a hidden number.

“Talk,” he would say without preamble.

I told him everything. He listened, asked precise questions, asked me to find specific invoices, emails, documents that Javier kept in an office he never allowed anyone to enter.

That’s where something came into play that I never confessed to Ernesto: my memory of Javier’s habits.

I knew how he left the key, where he hid the spare, what routines he had when he returned from work.

One night, after he had fallen asleep, I slipped down the hallway like a ghost. I took the key from the jacket he had thrown onto the sofa, opened the office, and photographed everything I found: contracts, transfer lists, company names identical to those in Ernesto’s documents.

As I took the photos with the cheap phone Ernesto had given me, I felt something in my chest.

Not just fear.

Also a strange sense of satisfaction.

Two weeks later, Ernesto summoned me to a discreet café in Chamberí. He arrived in his dark suit with a folder thicker than the previous one.