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Poison he had injected there.
She’d given a bitter smile. He had so much—and now he had a million pounds more. Another handful of gold on his towering heap. While children like those lived in filth and hunger and homelessness.
In the very country he had come from.
Maragua.
The charity rescued children from the streets of the capital, San Cristo.
Did he even know they existed? she had wondered, with bitterness in her soul. Their wretched lives were as alien to his lavish gilded existence as if he’d come from another planet.
Her eyes had dropped to the heading again: How you can help.
She had read on.
And as she had read she’d closed the drawer again.
And had reached for the phone to dial the number printed in the leaflet. A silent revenge on Diego’s way of life…
Father Tomaso murmured grace, made the sign of a blessing, and sat himself down at the supper table. At all the tables in the room the seated children started to chatter as the eldest at each table dished out the food.
‘So,’ said Father Tomaso, addressing the adults around him, ‘how are our latest crop of volunteers coming along? Have we made a good harvest this season?’
He smiled encouragingly. Though old, he was still vigorous, with a determination and a dogged dedication that inspired all his flock.
‘Can you say that again in English, Father?’ quipped a young man of twenty or so, in an American accent.
Many of the volunteers who supplemented the Maraguan house parents and teachers at the refuge came from America or Britain, and most were students, coming here in their vacations or gap years. Portia felt old in comparison—but never unwelcome.
She looked around her. The dining room was a plain whitewashed room, its plainness brightened by a vivid mural that ran around the four walls, painted by the children. It was a waving rainbow that wove in and out of an arkload of animals, some rather unlikely-looking from an anatomical perspective, but all painted with enthusiasm and verve. Every child who came to the refuge added an animal.
This was their ark, thought Portia. Their shelter from the storm.
And mine too…
The storm had almost destroyed her. The storm that Diego Saez had unleashed over her life.
She would never recover. Could never recover.
Because although the anger and the guilt had gone, assuaged in that final excoriating denunciation of him, what remained was more agonising still.
A pain that would be with her all her life.
The pain of having fallen in love—despite everything he had done to her—with a man as ruthless as Diego Saez.
Father Tomaso was talking again.
‘Tomorrow we have a visitor—a new volunteer! He cannot stay long, but while he is here I hope you will get good work out of him! He is strong, so I think we should corral him into helping with the building project. The walls of the new clinic grow high, but they must be higher yet, and there is still the roof to put on.’
‘Who is he, Father?’ asked one of the volunteers, curious.
‘He is a most remarkable man,’ answered the elderly priest. ‘He lived here once, in this very home. He came here, half-starved from the streets, but he was not from San Cristo. He had come here from the country, a vagrant without family. With nothing. Yet now…’ he paused. ‘Now he has everything that money can buy.’ Father Tomaso’s dark eyes saddened. ‘But nothing that it cannot.’
‘He’s rich, but he’s going to work on our building site?’ The volunteer asking the question sounded sceptical.
‘He does not know it yet,’ Father Tomaso remarked dryly.
There was some laughter.
