Rafael Is Awake
Chapter 05 - Rafael Is Awake
Adele Ruiz answered Matthew’s call from a gas station outside Pueblo.
She was seventy-one, retired, furious, and apparently driving a borrowed pickup with no air-conditioning because “menopause trained me for worse.”
Elena liked her before she understood why.
Matthew put the phone on speaker in the chapel room under Santa Lucia.
“Elena?” Adele asked.
“Yes.”
The older woman exhaled, and in that sound Elena heard two years of waiting.
“Your father knows your name.”
Elena sat very still.
It was such a small sentence.
It split her open.
Isabel had told her Rafael’s condition had worsened beyond recognition. That he no longer understood visitors. That seeing Elena upset him. That love sometimes meant not forcing the sick to perform memory.
Elena had believed enough to obey.
“He knows me?” she asked.
“He asks for you every morning.”
Rosa turned away, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand.
Matthew’s jaw tightened.
Adele continued. “Isabel moved him three times. First from Denver to Santa Fe. Then to Phoenix. Then two weeks ago to a private house outside Taos. She said it was for privacy. It was for paperwork.”
“What paperwork?”
“Competency review. Guardianship renewal. Share authorization. A doctor named Voss signed statements he should never have signed.”
Elena looked at the ledger in her lap.
Dr. Harold Voss.
Same name.
Her mother had written it years earlier.
“How do you know all this?” Matthew asked.
“I was Rafael’s night nurse until Isabel fired me for letting him hold a pen.”
Elena’s breath caught.
“A pen?”
“He wrote one word. Elena.”
The chapel blurred.
Matthew stepped closer but did not touch her.
Good.
If anyone touched her, she might fall apart.
Adele’s voice softened. “He is weak. He gets confused when tired. But he is not gone. And he did not agree to put you under any guardianship.”
Elena gripped the ledger.
“Where is he?”
“I have the address. But listen to me, niña. Isabel has private security there. Not many. Enough.”
Matthew took over.
“Send the address to my secure line.”
“Matthew Carranza?”
“Yes.”
Adele laughed once.
“About time you became useful.”
Rosa muttered, “Everyone has that opinion today.”
Adele sent the address.
Matthew looked at it, then at Elena.
“We cannot drive straight there.”
“My father is there.”
“Yes. And if Isabel knows we found Santa Lucia, she will expect you to run to him.”
“I’m not leaving him.”
“No one is asking you to.”
His voice stayed calm, which irritated her until she realized he was choosing calm because she had none left.
“We go with a court order, medical advocate, and witnesses,” Matthew said. “If we rush in alone, Isabel says you are emotional and unstable. She wins the story.”
Elena hated that he was right.
She hated even more that Isabel had trained every room to believe the worst version of her before she opened her mouth.
Rosa placed tea in Elena’s hands.
Where had tea come from in a chapel basement?
Elena did not know.
Older women, she was learning, could produce tea in emergencies the way men produced legal threats.
Matthew called someone named Teresa Bell.
The name made Rosa straighten.
Teresa arrived at Santa Lucia ninety minutes later in a cream SUV, wearing a charcoal pantsuit, silver hoop earrings, and the expression of a woman who had fired entire rooms for breathing wrong.
She was sixty-six and introduced herself as “your mother’s attorney when Marisol still believed love could be amended by contract.”
Elena almost smiled.
Teresa took the ledger, read four pages, and said, “Excellent. Your mother left a trail with teeth.”
Matthew handed her Adele’s message.
Teresa read it.
Then looked at Elena.
“Do you want your father free or do you want to feel better by sunset?”
Elena blinked.
“Excuse me?”
“Do you want a rescue scene or a legal structure he can survive after the cameras leave?”
Elena swallowed.
“My father free.”
“Good. Then we do this properly.”
Properly involved filings in two counties, emergency review of guardianship, medical transfer requests, preservation notices to Dr. Voss, and an order preventing Isabel from moving Rafael Vargas pending court review.
It also involved Elena eating soup because Rosa said court documents did not work on empty stomachs.
By evening, Elena sat at the kitchen table in Santa Lucia, surrounded by folders that proved her life had been bigger than the mansion allowed.
Matthew stood outside on the porch, speaking to Luis and two security men.
Teresa sat across from Elena.
“Your stepmother will attack your credibility first.”
“She already has.”
“No. Privately. Now she will do it publicly.”
Elena looked down.
The words still found old bruises.
Hysterical.
Dramatic.
Ungrateful.
Confused.
Teresa leaned forward.
“Elena, listen to me. When someone calls you unstable, answer with documents. When someone calls you emotional, answer with dates. When someone calls you ungrateful, ask what they gave you that was theirs.”
Elena wrote that down.
Teresa smiled faintly.
“Good girl. Never trust memory alone when money is nearby.”
A sound came from above.
Not footsteps.
A knock.
Everyone froze.
Matthew came in from the porch, hand raised to keep Elena behind him. She stepped around him immediately.
At the chapel door stood a teenage girl with rain in her hair and fear in her eyes.
She looked sixteen, maybe seventeen, with Isabel’s high cheekbones and a backpack hugged to her chest.
Rosa whispered, “Sofia.”
Elena stared.
Sofia Vargas.
Isabel’s daughter from before Rafael. The girl Isabel had sent to boarding school three years ago because, according to Isabel, Sofia had become impossible.
Sofia looked at Elena.
May you like
“I know where she keeps the real guardianship papers,” she said.
Then she began to cry.
