Love after Death (S1) [Completed]

Chapter 37: The Mirror in the Wreckage

Calix's POV

The Provincial Penitentiary was a cathedral of rot. It was a place where time didn't pass; it just piled up like dust in the corners of the soul. I sat at the scratched laminate table, the air tasting of ozone and the metallic tang of old ventilation.

When the door opened, Robin De Guzman walked in. He looked like a man who had been carved out of charcoal and then left in the rain to fade. He sat down, his hands-calloused and stained with decades of manual labor-trembling as he rested them on the table. He didn't look at me; he looked at the space between us, his spirit broken by twenty-five years of stolen time.

"I don't have any money," Robin rasped, his voice sounding like dry stones grinding together. "If my sister Sophia sent you, tell her to stop. I'm just a ghost the world forgot to bury."

"I'm not here for money, Robin," I said, leaning forward until the flickering fluorescent light caught the silver in his hair. "I'm here because of the night in 1996. The night a woman left your daughter on a bench, and a man ended up dead at the Thompson construction site."

Robin's head snapped up. The lethargy of the prisoner vanished, replaced by a raw, jagged terror that made his pupils dilate. He looked at me for a long time, his chest heaving. Then, a dry, hollow laugh escaped his lips.

"You know," Robin whispered, leaning toward the glass partition. "In twenty-five years... you're the first person to actually ask me about the woman. The police, the lawyers, the judges... they only wanted to talk about the blood on my coat. They only wanted to talk about the foreman I supposedly killed. No one ever asked who walked my Monique to that park. It was like she didn't exist to them. Like she was just a footnote in a murder trial."

"I'm asking now, Robin," I said, my voice dropping into a low, grounding hum. "Who was she? Who was the one who could walk away from a seven-year-old in a storm?"

Robin's hands curled into fists, his knuckles turning white. His breath fogged the glass, a small cloud of heat in a cold room.

"It wasn't a stranger, Calix," Robin hissed, his eyes moist with a grief that hadn't aged a day. "It was Maze. My wife. The woman I shared a bed with for eight years. The mother of my child."

I felt the world tilt. The name hit me like a physical blow to the solar plexus.

"Maze Thompson... was Maze De Guzman?"

"She hated the dirt," Robin said, tears finally spilling over his weathered cheeks. "She used to sit on the floor of our shanty and look at the magazines-the ones with the houses that had fountains and marble floors. She hated the smell of the grease on my skin from the site. She wanted the gold, Calix. She was always talking about her 'destiny.' That night... I came home from a double shift and the house was silent. No Monique. No Maze. Just an empty tin of rice and the sound of the rain."

He choked on a sob, his forehead pressing against the cool glass.

"I ran to the site. I thought maybe she'd gone to beg the foreman for an advance. I found him in the alleyway. He was already dead. The blood was still warm. I knelt down to help him, and that's when the police arrived. It was like they were waiting for me. She framed me, Calix. She killed the only man who saw her abandon our daughter, and then she used the body to bury me alive for a quarter of a century so she could start her new life."

"She told the world she was a single woman," I whispered, piece by piece the horror falling into place. "She told her new husband, Rudolph Thompson, that she never had a child."