MargenAleix Anglada's disappearance came down to a three-page file and a comfortable conclusion: probable drowning, body not recovered, case shelved for lack of evidence of foul play. Nuria had read it so many times that she knew it by heart, and that was the trap: when you know something by heart, you stop reading it.
This time she read it as a police officer and not as a sister. And on the last page, in the signature authorising the filing, she found what twenty years of grief had kept her from seeing. The investigating officer who closed the case, who decided there was nothing worth investigating, was called Marc Estivill.
The same Marc Estivill she was going to marry that autumn. The one who broke off the engagement three months after the disappearance, without explanation, and moved to another city. The one she had wept over, believing he had left her out of cowardice, unable to put up with a broken woman.
Now she understood that he had not left her. He had fled.
"Bru," she said on the phone, in the flattest voice she could manage. "I need everything there is on a former colleague. Marc Estivill. Where he is, what he does, whether he is still alive."
"Estivill..." Bru hesitated. "That name rings a bell, something recent. Give me an hour."
She gave him twenty minutes. When he called back, the subinspector's patient voice had turned wary, the voice of a man who has just stepped on glass in the dark.
"Nuria, that man left the force three years ago. But before he went he worked in port customs. And not in any old post. Estivill signed off the inspections on the containers that were never opened." He paused. "He signed off who came through and who did not. People included."
Anglada closed her eyes. The photograph. Her brother in the background, on the quay, the night he disappeared. A port that trafficked in names. A fiance who filed away her brother's death and then fled. None of it was coincidence, and she was beginning to fear that her own love story had been, from the very first day, a way of keeping watch on her.
That night, when she got back to her flat, the door was ajar. She never left the door ajar. She drew her weapon, pushed it open slowly, and on the kitchen table, where that morning there had been nothing, someone had left the original photograph. The real one. No plastic. And on the back, handwritten in a hand she recognised instantly because she had seen it on love letters, three words:
He is alive.