Some days begin with nothing and end by cutting a life clean in half.
Amparo Velázquez had worked in the Solano house for eleven years, and she still could not explain how an ordinary afternoon of sunlight and warm tiles turned into the worst hour she had ever lived.
The house sat inside a gated community on the northern edge of the city, the kind of street where the gardeners arrive at seven and the household staff at half past six. Amparo was never late. She wore the pale blue uniform that Señora Camila insisted be spotless, and she carried the same cloth bag she had carried for years — a thermos of coffee inside it, and a small laminated photograph of her mother that had gone soft at the corners.
That afternoon the sun pressed down hard on the back garden. The pool lay still and bright, like a mirror nobody should trust.
Baby Tomás, eight months old, slept in his grey stroller under a blanket his grandmother had knitted. Camila had gone out for coffee with friends and left the child with Amparo, exactly as she had done a hundred times before.
The kitchen clock read twenty past four when Amparo heard the gate.
