Inside the messy drawer are old electricity bills, crumpled hardware store receipts, loose silver screws, a yellow tape measure, two glossy church pamphlets—and a black smartphone I do not recognize.
My pulse violently spikes.
It is an older model phone, sporting a deeply scratched screen. I press the power button. The battery icon glows red at 18 percent. I swipe the screen.
No passcode.
A wave of icy clarity washes through my entire nervous system. Men who believe themselves to be brilliantly clever often grow incredibly careless inside their own hidden, comfortable systems.
I open the phone. It holds no real names in its contacts—only vague initials. But it is the hidden photo gallery app that makes my mouth go completely dry.
Screenshots. Hundreds of them. Women saved from local social media profiles. Cropped images. Zoomed-in shots of waists and thighs.
Then, I scroll down.
There is a photo of Lucía standing right here on our roof, hanging the white sheets. It was clearly captured from inside the house, shot covertly through the dusty glass of the third-floor window.
My hand shakes so violently I almost drop the device.
At the very bottom of the expansive gallery is a video file, exactly three seconds long. I press play. It begins pitch dark and unfocused, then slowly sharpens just enough to show a wooden bedroom door cracked slightly open in the blackness. The camera lens edges terrifyingly closer to the crack.
The clip abruptly cuts off.
I do not need to ask anyone which room that door belongs to.
My heart hammering against my ribs, I quickly Bluetooth the worst files—the video, the roof photo, the cropped images—directly to my own phone. Then, wiping my fingerprints off the screen, I place the burner phone back into the drawer, exactly as I found it.
I quietly shut the drawer just as the water stopped. Footsteps padded heavily toward the bedroom door. I had the proof, but the monster was walking right toward me.
The confrontation inevitably happens on a suffocatingly hot Sunday afternoon, when everyone is finally trapped inside the house together.
My mother is downstairs in the parlor, napping. Esteban is out in the sweltering garage. Tomás is sitting in the second-floor sitting room, intensely focused on fixing a wobbling oscillating fan with a screwdriver. Lucía sits rigidly on the edge of the floral couch, her hands twisted into agonizing knots.
I stand by the large open window. “Tomás,” I say, my voice slicing through the hum of the afternoon heat. “Put the screwdriver down.”
