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I couldn’t stop crying. The pain! I just wanted him to get his hands away from me.
‘You try and leave, and I’ll find you, Ana,’ he continued. ‘I’ll find you and I’ll make you watch while I kill that boy in front of you.’ He returned his black eyes to me and grinned.
It wasn’t over. It would never be over.
Solemnly, Guillermo and I stood over the suitcase; over the dead infant lying on his side in a swathe of blankets, dressed in a pale yellow jumpsuit, already cold, his skin waxy and pale in death, face frozen in an eternal sleep, on his side, as if someone tucked him up in his bed and left him to die.
Only, I know he hadn’t just been left to die. He’d been killed. Smothered, probably. And I knew who was responsible.
Somewhere in the background, a phone started to ring. It was mine. In slow motion, I reached for it.
I pressed answer and switched the phone to speaker mode, holding it in front of me so that Guillermo could hear. I didn’t speak. I couldn’t speak.
‘I take it by your screams that you opened your gift,’ Emilio said, the only things filling the room his voice, and death.
‘Why?’ I asked, my voice anguished beyond recognition.
‘Your gift, Mariana. A lesson.’
‘What lesson?’ I cried. ‘What lesson!?’
‘An important lesson. Are you ready?’
I didn’t answer. I was reeling.
‘Don’t ever try to tempt fate,’ Emilio said coldly. His words barely broke the surface of my reality. Because there was a fucking suitcase on my kitchen table with a dead baby inside it.
I dropped the phone, and the screen cracked, turning black. Guillermo’s fingers were on my arm, I realised, digging in painfully. I looked down at his hand as if I were moving in slow motion, feeling the way he trembled violently against my flesh.
‘I didn’t sign up for this,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Nah, man, no fucking way. I didn’t sign up for this.’
I tilted my head to the side, getting a better look at the baby boy.
Button nose.
Dark hair.
Rosebud lips.
Dead.
I reached my hand out to touch his cheek, knowing it’d be cold but unable to stop myself. I was a mother, after all. My instinct said to nurture, to protect, even if this child was too far gone. Guillermo tugged my arm back forcefully before I could make contact.
‘What?’ I asked dumbly. That ringing in my ears – the buzzing noise that wouldn’t go away for weeks after Murphy – it was back. It filled my head with a reverberating whine that was as excruciating as it was bleak.
A car revved loudly outside, and Guillermo left the suitcase long enough to peer out of the window next to the front door.
‘He’s gone,’ he said.
Emilio had gotten what he came for. My horror. My screams. Now he could continue his day, having ticked the box Fuck with Mariana’s head.
Guillermo slowly folded the suitcase lid shut, the tiny body disappearing from view.
‘Wait,’ I said weakly. ‘We have to call the police.’ An image of Lindsay Price floated somewhere in my racing thoughts, the FBI agent who’d accosted me in the women’s showers at my gym. I had to call him.
Guillermo glared at me with bloodshot eyes. ‘The fuck did you just say?’
‘The police. The FBI. We have to call someone. Guillermo, it’s a baby!’
