Before we went to sleep, if one can call that sleep, Carmen handed me one of her coverlets. She said her friends had brought her two, the pretty woman who’d been released earlier had used one the night before, and now it was mine to use for the night. I placed the tiny pillow Vania had brought me under my head, used the borrowed coverlet as a sleeping mat, wrapped myself in my father’s jacket, and suddenly realized my sleeping arrangements weren’t as terrible as I had imagined. Not even the hundreds of baby cockroaches wandering about bothered me. My biggest problem was caused by the many mosquitoes biting my feet throughout the night. Never did I imagine that I was only beginning a journey that would turn into an ongoing and arduous battle for my freedom, with the hope that justice would finally prevail.
Chapter 2
The Beginning of the End
As I tried to sleep on the carceleta’s cold concrete bench, I could not help thinking of the journey that had somehow brought me there. My world collapsed on July 29, 2014. It had actually begun collapsing quite a while before that fateful day, but I was none the wiser.
How could I have not seen the storm that was heading my way?
—
On the morning of July 29, 2014, I woke up on the forty-sixth floor in our apartment overlooking Biscayne Bay, the Port of Miami, and South Beach, as I’d done on so many other mornings. I loved sleeping with the blinds open, falling asleep with a billion lights shining in the night, and opening my eyes the next day as the sun rose over the ocean on the horizon.
Miami was a familiar place to me; it was where I was born, and after being raised in Guatemala City, it is where I returned as a young woman to attend the University of Miami in Coral Gables, and it is the city I called home during the following seventeen years after graduation, where I became an adult. When I finally moved back to Guatemala in 2003, within weeks of my arrival, I found love. I was thirty-five years old, had been engaged twice before, but had never gotten married. Marriage had not been a goal in my life, but that suddenly changed.
My husband and I got married in 2008 and a year later, God blessed us with twins: a girl, Nina, and a boy, Fabián. I could not have been happier or felt more fortunate. My husband had been doing very well with his business endeavors, and every year seemed to bring more projects and more possibilities. He had managed to bring a forestry investment firm to Guatemala and began creating one of the largest teak plantations in the world. Every year, more trees were planted and his management revenues grew. He also had other plans; he seemed to never stand still.
That year, my husband had decided to run the IRONMAN race in Nice, France. As with his other interests in life, he prepared, training hard, and was ready to tackle what he’d set his mind to do. Since it was scheduled for the middle of the summer, we decided to bring the children along. We rented a small apartment in the center of Nice, packed our bags, and enjoyed a wonderful month-long vacation in the south of France. When we returned, my husband flew to Guatemala, while the kids and I made one last stop in Miami before continuing home. The children were to start school at the American School of Guatemala, the same school my husband and I had attended as children. Life seemed to be smiling in our direction, and there was no reason for me to think otherwise. Until that one day, when I woke up and realized that soon my life would never be the same again.
It must have been around 9 p.m. The children were already sleeping in their room, exhausted after another fun-filled summer day in Miami. As I sat on my bed watching TV, the phone rang. It was my husband calling me from Guatemala.
“I have something very important I need to tell you. Are you sitting down?” he asked. “I have gotten myself in deep financial troubles. I have been trying to get it all sorted out for a while now, and I was hoping to fix things before you ever found out, but it has become impossible. I needed you to hear it from me.”
I remember hearing something about his taking something he should not have, and in my ingenuity, I simply said, “Well, give it back.”
“It’s not possible,” he said, “I can’t say anything else about this over the phone. I’ll be back in Miami tomorrow.”
My entire life changed with those words. They were simple, but I knew my world would never be the same again. I hung up, still sitting on my bed, overlooking the magnificent bay, and suddenly felt as if my life were not mine, as if I was now in a movie and my life was happening to someone else—these things didn’t happen to people like me. And even though at that moment nothing had changed, everything was suddenly different. I was paralyzed, yet my brain was going a million miles an hour. My life was still intact, I was seemingly safe, but those words had changed everything. I did not understand what had just happened, or how I felt, and I did not have enough information to devise a plan or figure out a course of action. All I knew for sure was that I had to focus on the important things, what was left: Nina and Fabián. Yes, Nina and Fabián, and all that I could not see at that moment but would surely be there when the storm passed . . . because this too shall pass . . . or so I had been told.
For the next two days I was in a fog. I thought I would go crazy. I was exhausted, I could not sleep, I could not eat, I knew a devastating tornado was about to make landfall in our lives, and yet I was going through the day doing things that changed nothing. And my husband, whom I loved for so many wonderful reasons, was suddenly a stranger to me. He needed my support and I had no idea how to help him. We were both drowning in the ocean, unable to save each other. And despite my indescribable fear and my anger at realizing that my own husband had destroyed my young family, I still felt the need to protect him. If someone had asked me just a few days prior to receiving this news, what I would have done if I had found myself in this very predicament, I would most likely have said that I would not tolerate such deceit and would never be able to stand by someone capable of so many lies. And yet there I stood, crying and overwhelmed by fear, bombarded by news that grew worse by the hour.
Upon his return to Miami, I tried helplessly to understand everything my husband was attempting to explain to me. I needed to know what had happened, what was going on, and yet my brain could not make sense out of any of it. At some point during those first days after his return, I found myself taking his hands in mine and telling him, “Listen, we all make mistakes and we are all so much more than our worst missteps.” It was at that moment that he finally broke down and cried.
Everything about my life had suddenly become uncertain. I assumed he would have to face the consequences of his actions, and I would have to build a new life. My husband insisted I did not deserve any of this. I could not say what it was I deserved, but the fact of the matter was that my life had changed forever. If these changes were for better or for worse, only time would tell.
While we navigated through the following week, my husband suddenly claimed he could not go on. He talked about how months had passed while he desperately tried to plan a way out of this mess. He said that the only reason he had not taken his life was to protect his children and me. Every day came with new pieces of information regarding his predicament and what he had been trying to do these past years, all while I had obliviously been enjoying my so-called perfect life. It was all very complicated, but I kept holding on to one truth: he had not killed anyone. Yes, he would have to pay the consequences for his actions, but I truly believed that eventually we’d be able to figure it all out.
As I tried to understand everything that was happening, as I tried to put all the pieces of the puzzle together, and figure out how to continue living my life, I was overwhelmed by deep sadness when I slowly realized that my husband and I had not been partners for a while, and that my