Chapter 7: Valentina's voice splits the silence in two

Nobody expected the piano. Valentina crossed the room without looking at anyone, pushed the stool away with her hip, and sat down in front of the dust-covered Bösendorfer as if she had been doing so for years.

He lifted the lid with almost reverential care. Two keys in the middle octave were silent; the others responded as their fingers found the chord, twisted and perfect at the same time.

He started singing without warning. It was an old couplet, one of those that smells of dried basil and the courtyard of Triana.

Valentina's voice was neither big nor polite; It was one of those that hurt because they know where to aim. Rosa closed her eyes.

Clara stopped looking at the briefcase. Marta dropped the fragments of the check on the table without realizing it.

Elena didn't move, but she stopped breathing hard. When the last note dissolved into the humidity of the walls, Valentina spoke to the keyboard, not to the women.

«Julián taught me this couplet the first night. "He said it was his grandmother's." Pause.

"Then I learned that he taught it to everyone." Nobody laughed. Nobody interrupted her.

"I am pregnant." He said it the same as he had sung: without embellishment. «Three months.

When I told him, he called me a liar. Then he threatened to tell the owner of the Tablao Carboneras that I had stolen cash.

It was a lie, but it was enough for him to say it. Marta looked up. «That afternoon I came two hours before the storm.

We argued in the garden. "He told me that if I went ahead with the pregnancy, it would destroy what little I had." The voice did not break; it sharpened.

«I left slamming the door. I left him alive, furious and with a glass of sherry in his hand. The silence that followed weighed differently.

It was Elena who took the SIM card from the envelope where Valentina had left it and held it under the candle. "Whoever sent the messages was here before the storm." Her voice was that of an architect reading a plan, not that of a widow.

«Valentina arrived at six. The storm started at eight.

That leaves a window. Marta completed the reasoning before anyone asked her: «None of the four of us had this card. Valentina found her behind the painting. He paused calculatedly.

«Who else was in La Villa this afternoon before the storm hit?"Five pairs of eyes turned, slowly and simultaneously, towards Rosa Costa. Julián's mother did not get up.

But his hands, until that moment still in his lap, closed into a tight fist that no one in the room pretended not to see.

Lies: The Silence of the Villa

Lies: The Silence of the Villa