Chapter 10 - What Tomas Had Hidden From Everyone
Rosa read the insurance schedule three times.
Boxes 1 through 27 were described as treatment files and client records.
Boxes 28 through 43 had a different notation.
PRIVATE DUPLICATES — HOME.
Rosa whispered, “Home?”
Mariana looked around the half-empty house.
They had already packed everything.
No archive existed there.
Then Rosa remembered Tomas renovating the detached garage shortly before his diagnosis.
He had built a narrow climate-controlled storage closet behind a wall of shelving.
After his death, Rosa had used the garage for garden tools.
She had never opened the locked interior cabinet because she assumed it contained solvents she did not know how to dispose of safely.
The house belonged to new owners now.
Rosa called them.
She did not invent an emergency.
She explained exactly what had happened and asked permission to retrieve personal records accidentally left behind.
The buyers agreed to meet them there with Rachel present.
Inside the garage, behind two rusted paint cans, Rosa found Tomas’s key taped beneath a shelf.
The cabinet opened.
Sixteen gray archival boxes sat inside.
Each sealed with burgundy wax.
Mariana covered her mouth.
The first boxes contained duplicates of conservation reports.
Before-and-after photographs.
Handwritten condition notes.
Copies of client correspondence.
Everything Tomas considered important enough to preserve separately from his working studio.
But Box 41 changed the story.
It contained letters Tomas had written to an attorney six months before his cancer diagnosis.
He had discovered that several high-value paintings from the Davenport collection were being offered with histories inconsistent with works he had previously conserved.
Tomas had not accused Malcolm Davenport of creating the problem.
In fact, his notes suggested the opposite.
Malcolm had hired Tomas because he suspected someone around his collection was manipulating records.
That person was not Alejandro.
Alejandro was twenty-nine and barely established then.
The person repeatedly appearing in Tomas’s correspondence was Alejandro’s mentor and early financial backer.
Victor Vega.
Alejandro’s uncle.
Mariana sat down on the garage floor.
Suddenly three things made sense.
Why Alejandro had purchased an apparently worthless conservator’s archive.
Why he had recognized the value of Tomas’s private notes so quickly after Mariana described them.
And why he had been willing to build an entire relationship around staying close to the Alvarez family.
He had not discovered the archive after falling in love with Mariana.
He had known Tomas possessed dangerous records before he ever approached her.
Rosa’s voice became barely audible.
“He met you because of your father.”
Mariana stared at the sealed boxes.
May you like
The deepest betrayal was no longer that Alejandro had used their relationship after discovering an opportunity.
The relationship itself might have begun as the opportunity.
