THE TIME THAT DIDN’T EXIST
I thought I had misunderstood him.
“What did you say?”
The paramedic showed me the report.
I couldn’t make sense of the numbers.
The accident had supposedly happened shortly after 10 p.m.
But Ana’s recorded time of death was earlier.
Almost forty minutes earlier.
“That’s impossible,” I said.
The police had called me after the accident.
The hospital had received her later.
The paperwork had been processed afterward.
None of it made sense.
The paramedic looked at the crematorium employee.
“Don’t move this body.”
The employee nodded.
The Civil Police were called immediately.
Within minutes, the crematorium became a crime scene.
Ana was transferred to the hospital because Miguel’s heartbeat was still detectable.
I followed the ambulance.
The entire drive, I held Ana’s cold hand.
“Stay with us,” I whispered.
“Please.”
At the hospital, doctors rushed her into an emergency operating room.
A doctor stopped me before the doors closed.
“Your son has a heartbeat.”
“Can you save him?”
“We’re going to try.”
The doors closed.
I sat in the hallway.
For nearly an hour, nobody told me anything.
Then I heard it.
A cry.
Small.
Angry.
Alive.
Miguel had survived.
I covered my face and cried.
But the relief lasted only seconds.
A police officer approached me.
“Mr. Almeida?”
I stood.
“We need to ask you some questions.”
“About Ana?”
“About everything.”
He showed me a photograph.
It was Ana’s car.
The front was badly damaged.
Then he showed me another.
The driver’s seat.
“There is something strange.”
“What?”
“The airbag didn’t deploy.”
I stared at him.
“Does that matter?”
“It can.”
He showed me another photograph.
The seatbelt.
“It was cut.”
My stomach dropped.
“Cut?”
“Yes.”
“Could the crash have done that?”
“Possibly.”
“But you don’t sound convinced.”
He looked at me.
“I’m not.”
Then he asked something that made my blood run cold.
“When was the last time you saw your wife alive?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
“Where?”
“At home.”
“Who else was there?”
I hesitated.
“Gustavo.”
The officer wrote something down.
“Her brother?”
“Yes.”
“Why was he there?”
“I don’t know.”
The officer looked at me.
“Mr. Almeida, according to the phone records, Gustavo called your wife three times before the accident.”
“Maybe they were arguing.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know.”
The officer closed his notebook.
“We found something else.”
He placed Ana’s phone on the table.
“The last message she sent wasn’t to you.”
I stared at the screen.
The message had been deleted.
But investigators had recovered part of it.
Only seven words were visible.
If anything happens to me, check…
The rest was missing.
“Check what?” I asked.
“We don’t know.”
I looked toward the hospital doors.
Ana was fighting for her son.
And suddenly I realized something terrifying.
Maybe the accident wasn’t the beginning of this story.
Maybe it was the end of something Ana had discovered before she died.
