Chapter 3 - Six Hundred and Twenty Million PesosRodrigo logged into an internal banking system I had never seen before. "Renata created this trust in the late 1990s," he explained. "She gradually invested in technology, telecommunications, and digital infrastructure companies at a time when almost no one in Mexico was paying attention to those sectors."

I stared at him. Renata? The woman who spent her days repairing old leather bindings and always claimed she knew nothing about investing? Apparently, she had quietly built a fortune of her own.

"How much?"

Rodrigo turned the monitor toward me.

Six hundred and twenty million pesos.

For several seconds, I couldn't speak. I felt pride. Astonishment. And a deep sadness. I had shared more than forty years with an extraordinary woman and had never known this side of her.

But Rodrigo wasn't smiling. "There's a problem."

"What?"

"The money is being transferred out."

An international transaction appeared on the screen. The entire value of the trust was being sent to a company registered in the Cayman Islands. The transfer had been initiated at 10:15 that morning.

At 10:15, I had been standing in church beside Renata's coffin, giving the final speech at her funeral.

"Who authorized it?"

Rodrigo opened the verification documents. There were notarized powers of attorney. My signature was there. So was Renata's. Both were fake.

Then Rodrigo showed me another record. The emergency verification request had been sent to the email listed as the family contact. Camila's email address.

I didn't feel anger immediately. What I felt was colder. A terrible calm. And suddenly, I understood why Camila had thrown away the notebook so casually. She hadn't believed it was worthless. She believed the account would already be empty.

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Fortunately, the transfer had been flagged for manual review and had not yet been completed. Rodrigo contacted the financial crimes unit at the District Attorney's office. Agents arrived quietly and confirmed that the funds could be frozen without alerting whoever had initiated the transfer.

I asked them for forty-eight hours. "If you arrest whoever did this now, you'll have one fraudulent transaction. I want to know how much deeper this goes."