The social worker stood up.

—I… I have to report this…

“And she will,” Méndez replied. “But first I want the entire custody file for the minor, the psychological interviews, and any records of Aunt Clara’s visits. Everything. In my office. In ten minutes.”

The woman paled and left without protesting.

Ramira continued to hug her daughter as if someone were going to snatch her away again.

Méndez leaned forward slightly, just enough to be at Salomé’s eye level.

—Could you recognize that man if you saw a photo?

The girl nodded without hesitation.

-Yeah.

-Good.

He looked at Ramira.

For five years, every time she saw him cross the ward, she felt the same mixture of hatred and resignation. He was the face of the end. The man who signed schedules, protocols, and silences. But now, in that narrow room smelling of iron and disinfectant, Méndez didn’t look like an executioner. He looked like a tired old man who had just realized that perhaps he had been leading an innocent woman to her death.

“Mrs. Fuentes,” he finally said. “I need you to tell me exactly the same thing you told me in your first statement, without omitting anything, even if you think it no longer matters.”

Ramira looked at him like someone watching a door open after years of banging their head against a wall.

—Are you going to listen to me now?

It took him a second to respond.

-Yeah.

And for the first time, it sounded as if it hurt him to say it.

The following hours changed everyone’s destiny.

Méndez reopened the case from within, using the authority he still held and the pressure of a last-minute suspension of proceedings. He ordered the complete case file to be brought in—not just the court summary, but everything: original statements, expert reports, interviews, discarded names, psychological reports, and recordings of the scene.

He found what no one wanted to look at.

The weapon had Ramira’s fingerprints, yes, but also partial remains of another person never properly identified due to “poor quality of the evidence collection.” The famous witness who claimed to have seen her leaving the house that night contradicted himself on two different occasions. And the report by the psychologist who interviewed Salomé included a disturbing phrase, noted in the margin and then ignored: “The minor insists on a man with a conspicuous watch, but her narrative seems to have been tainted by post-traumatic stress.”

Contaminated.

That word had been enough to bury the only clean voice in the case.

At four in the afternoon, Salomé was taken to a simplified photo identification room. Among several images of men in suits, some known to her father, others added as a control, the girl immediately pointed to one.

He didn’t hesitate.
He didn’t waver.
He didn’t even need to touch the photo.

-That.

It was Hector Becerra.

Lawyer.
Financial advisor.
Close friend of Esteban.
And, according to a note lost in accounting appendices, a man implicated in a series of documents that Esteban refused to sign months before he died.

When Méndez saw the pointed-out photo, he felt an icy pang in his stomach. He remembered that surname from somewhere else. Not from the trial. From a private call he’d received a week earlier, when the sentence could still be carried out quietly. A voice told him that “the Fuentes case” should be closed as it was, for everyone’s sake, and that dwelling too much on the past only tarnished respectable institutions.

They didn’t mention any names.

It wasn’t necessary.

Now it was really needed.

He called the state prosecutor’s office directly.

Not just any office.
To the wrongful conviction review unit.

He shouted.
He demanded.
He used thirty years of service as if they were finally serving some useful purpose.

That same night a special prosecutor arrived with two agents and a skeptical expression that transformed into something else as she listened to Salomé repeat the story of the clock, the back door and the “I wasn’t going to sign”.

Ramira did not return to her cell.

She was transferred to a secure room while the formal suspension of her execution was issued and an urgent review of the sentence was requested.

They haven’t released her yet.

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