She stood in the hallway, a picture frame in her hand that she'd pulled off the wall. I furrowed my brow, stepping up behind her as she blinked at it with something like shock on her face.
"Do you know this man?" she asked, her voice barely a whisper as she pointed to the only man in the photo. He stood with my mother and I, one of the only portraits of us as a family before her death.
After his death, I'd gotten rid of all the evidence of him from my home. I wantednothingto do with Miguel Ibarra. I never wanted to look at his face again.
So why did Isa look as if she'd seen a ghost?
"That's my father," I admitted, taking the photo from her hands. I stared down at my mother's hesitant smile, at the signs of the abuse she'd already begun to suffer at my father's hands as his sanity faded away and he was lost to the intense paranoia that consumed him. He'd never been a good man or husband, but there was bad and then there was worse.
"Your father?" she whimpered.
I hung it back on the wall, turning back to Isa when I realized she hadn't moved except to stare up at the picture as her cheeks grew wet with sudden tears.
"Princesa?" I asked, catching her chin with a delicate finger and forcing her to look at me. "What's wrong?"
There was a pause as she stared at me, blinking back the tears that consumed her. Her breathing turned ragged, as if she was caught in a waking nightmare.
"That's him," she whispered. "That's the man who threw me in the river."