During the first few days, I simply observed. The apartment in the Salamanca district was enormous, minimalist, filled with contemporary art I didn’t understand. On the walls were photos of their civil wedding: Javier in a navy suit, Lucía in a simple white dress, smiling as if the world belonged to them.

There was no trace of me.

As if that chapter had never existed.

From the kitchen I overheard fragments of conversations, interrupted phone calls, company names. I mentally noted everything that sounded strange: repeated references to accounts in Luxembourg, to “discreet partners,” to “moving funds before the end of the quarter.”

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.

“This is enough,” he said, without even asking me to sit down. “My lawyers are already working. There will be a surprise inspection from the tax authorities and another from the Economic Crimes Unit.”

“And me?” I asked. “What will happen to me when everything explodes?”

Ernesto looked at me the way one looks at a tool that has worked even better than expected.

“When this is over, you’ll be free,” he replied. “You’ll have enough money to never go back to a bridge. And if you’re smart, no one will ever know who you really are.”

I nodded, but didn’t move.

“I want one more thing,” I said.

He raised an eyebrow.