Chapter 22: Second Chance

"Mrs. Soledad Aldama," the woman in the gray suit said again, "we have a warrant."

Soledad laughed.

It was a small, brittle laugh, and it did not carry past the head table.

"I am the chair of the board of this Foundation."

"You were the chair until six o'clock this evening, ma'am. The board met by phone."

The investigator held out a folded paper.

"Theft by a fiduciary. Misapplication of a trust. Fraud on a vulnerable beneficiary."

"Alma was not vulnerable. She was a receptionist."

The ballroom gasped.

It was one long inhale from four hundred people, and I felt it in my chest.

Soledad heard it too.

She turned slowly, looking at the tables, at the women she had sat beside for twenty years.

None of them met her eyes.

A board member, a gray man in a tuxedo, took a step back from her chair.

"You'll want to take your pearls off, ma'am," one of the officers said quietly. "The jail won't allow them."

She unclasped the necklace with her own fingers.

She laid it in the investigator's hand.

Then she looked straight at me, across the white tablecloth and the ten broken seals.

"He will always come home," she said.

"No, Soledad," I said. "He won't."

Rodrigo stood three feet away with the hatbox.

He did not look at his mother.

He looked at the floor.

The officers walked her down the long aisle between the tables, past every phone, and out the double doors.

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