Clara got goosebumps.
—Where does that family live?
Veronica took two seconds.
Then he gave her the address.
Clara hung up and stood still, holding the phone in her hand.
It wasn’t a test.
It was an intuition.
One of those intuitions that keeps you up at night.
That same afternoon, after leaving his shift, he drove to the San Jerónimo neighborhood.
I wasn’t planning to do anything irrational.
Just look.
Confirm that everything was okay.
Silence that internal alarm.
The house was two stories, with an impeccable facade and a small garden.
From the outside it looked normal.
Too normal.
Clara stayed inside the car for a few minutes.
Then he saw something.
A girl of about eight years old appeared in a side window on the second floor.
He looked towards the street.
Her face was swollen from crying.
When he saw Clara looking at the house, he raised something against the glass.
It was a leaf.
A folded sheet of paper with large, crooked letters written in red marker.
HELP MY LITTLE BROTHER.
Clara felt her heart give a sharp blow.
The girl disappeared immediately.
The next second, someone closed the curtain from the inside.
Clara was already getting out of the car.
He walked to the gate and rang the bell loudly.
Nobody answered.
He played again.
Nothing.
She walked around the house along the sidewalk and then heard something that froze her to the spot.
A cry.
Sharp.
Desperate.
A baby.
And above that crying, the voice of a woman.
—Shut up already!
There was a coup.
He didn’t know what against.
But he heard it.
And that was enough.
Clara pulled out her phone with trembling fingers and called emergency services.
He spoke quickly.
He gave the address.
He explained what he had seen.
What I had heard.
The patrol took nine minutes.
To Clara, it seemed like forty.
When they arrived, the door still wasn’t open.
The officers heard the crying from outside.
The girl started screaming from inside.
—Please come in! Mom is hurting the baby!
What followed was an explosion of voices, orders, and footsteps.
They forced their way in.
Clara wasn’t supposed to go through, but she managed to see enough from the threshold.
The mother was in the room, distraught, distraught, with her eyes wild.
The baby was crying in a pen, red, soaked in tears.
The girl was trembling behind an armchair.
And the father, pale as death, kept repeating that it was all a misunderstanding.
It wasn’t.
The investigations progressed quickly.
Too fast.
The woman was going through a severe mental health crisis that had been ignored for weeks.
The husband knew.
The immediate family suspected something.
But nobody wanted to name him.
Nobody wanted to ask for help.
And Luna…
Luna had been the first to notice it.
That’s why he stood in the way.
That’s why he was growling.
That’s why he slept across from the baby’s room.
