You make one decision, small and viciously precise. You ask your head of security to pull the traffic camera footage from the intersection, not the city’s cameras, yours. Money can’t buy love, but it can buy angles, timestamps, and the direction a barefoot girl takes when she disappears into Paraty’s wet labyrinth. Your driver glances at you again like he can sense a storm forming inside the car, and you give him the only instruction that matters: “Find out where she lives.”
You tell yourself you’re being careful. You tell yourself you’re not going to scare her, not going to drag her into some billionaire nightmare of questions and lawyers and blood tests. But the truth is simpler and uglier: you are terrified that if you wait, she’ll evaporate like every other good thing in your life. You watch the wipers slice the world into clean and dirty halves, and you wonder which side you belong on.
That night, you don’t go back to your mansion overlooking the bay. You go to your office, because offices are where feelings go to be punished into silence. Glass walls, cold lights, assistants who don’t ask personal questions, and a desk that has heard you say “handle it” more times than it has heard you say “I miss her.” You pull up the old file you never deleted, labeled LETÍCIA M. and dated sixteen years ago like a wound that still has stitches in it.
There are photos in the file, the ones you kept even after you burned the rest of your life down. Letícia laughing with flour on her cheek because she insisted on making pão de queijo from scratch even when you could have hired a chef. Letícia in your hoodie, hair in a messy bun, holding the ultrasound photo like it was a ticket to a future she trusted. You stare until your eyes sting, then you scroll to the last thing in the file: the letter she left you.
You could recite it from memory, but you read it anyway, the way people touch bruises just to confirm they’re real. She wrote that she had to go. She wrote that she was sorry. She wrote that you would hate her but that one day you’d understand.
You never understood. You built an empire instead, because empires don’t leave you pregnant and alone.
Your security chief calls at 11:43 p.m. and tells you they found the girl. You don’t say “thank you” like a normal person; you say, “Where?” The address he gives you isn’t a street so much as a description: a narrow lane behind the old church, near the cobblestones that never dry, in a part of town tourists photograph but don’t really see. He adds one detail that makes your throat tighten: “She lives with her mother.”
You stand up so fast your chair squeals. Your body reacts like it has been waiting sixteen years for permission. You look at the mirror in your office window, the reflection of a man in an expensive suit pretending he isn’t about to run into the rain and beg the past to stop running. You whisper her name once, not into the phone, not for anyone else, just to hear if the world still recognizes it: “Letícia.”
