"Nobody leaves.

The man in the dark suit didn't make it to the parking lot.

The young officer caught him at the entrance hall doors, and whatever conversation followed was short.

Ricardo watched through the chapel window as the man turned back, his expression flat and deliberate — the expression of someone who had decided that cooperation was now the safer option.

He was brought back inside.

His name, it turned out, was Marcos.

He had worked for Helena for six years.

He said this without being asked, as if establishing the relationship early might somehow soften what came after it.

"What were you hired to do today?" the officer asked.

Marcos looked at Helena.

She looked at the floor.

"Ms.

Souza asked me to attend the service," he said.

"And to make sure the phone was retrieved before anyone had a chance to use it."

"Retrieved from whom?"

A pause.

"From the child."

Bia didn't look up.

She was running her thumb along the seam of the doll's dress in slow, even strokes, the way children do when they are listening carefully and trying not to show it.

"And the second man?" the officer asked.

"He was there as support.

In case there was resistance."

"From a six-year-old."

Marcos said nothing.

Ricardo looked at Helena.

"You sent two men to a funeral to take a phone from Bia."

"I sent them to protect my interests."

"She is six years old and she just buried her mother."

"And that phone contains private information that—"

"That phone contains your sister's voice telling me you kjlled her."

The word landed in the chapel like something physical.

Helena flinched.

It was small — a tightening around the eyes, a barely-visible pull at the corner of her mouth — but Ricardo had been watching her for nine years and he saw it.

"I did not kjll my sister," Helena said.

"I made a medical decision that—"

"The doctor flagged it," Ricardo said.

"Three weeks ago.

He flagged it himself and was told it wasn't actionable.

He's going to talk now.

What do you think he's going to say?"

Helena looked at Ferreira.

Ferreira said, carefully, "I'd like to advise my client not to answer further questions without—"

"She signed a directive," Ricardo said.

"Full intervention.

Everything available.

She signed it four years ago and she never changed it.

The proxy Helena had her sign didn't replace it — it just gave Helena authority to override it.

And in the last seventy-two hours of Vera's life, someone made the decision to withdraw the intervention Vera had specifically asked for." He looked at the officer.

"That's what the doctor flagged.

Isn't it."

It wasn't a question.

The officer didn't answer directly.

"The investigation will determine what decisions were made and by whom."

"I didn't do anything that wasn't within my legal authority," Helena said.

Her voice had lost some of its steadiness.

"The proxy was legal.

The decisions were legal.

Everything I did was—"

"Was it legal to have her phone the night she d*ed?" Ricardo asked.

"Was it legal to keep it from her so she couldn't call anyone?

Was it legal to make sure I couldn't reach her those last four times I called?"

Helena's mouth opened.

Closed.

"Because if she had answered," Ricardo said, "I would have gone to her.

And if I had gone to her, I would have seen what was happening.

And if I had seen what was happening, I would have stopped it."

The chapel was completely silent.

Bia set the doll down on the pew beside her.

She looked up at her aunt with an expression that was not anger and not fear.

It was something more difficult than either — the look of a child trying to understand how someone who had held her hand at Christmas could also be the person in this room.

"Aunt Helena," she said.

"Did you make Mama go away faster?"

Helena looked at her niece.

For a long moment, she said nothing.

Then: "I thought it was the kindest thing."

"She wasn't ready," Bia said.

"She told me she wasn't ready.

She said she had more things to tell me."

Helena's face did something then that no calculation could have produced.

It simply broke — not into tears, not into apology, but into the specific blankness of someone who has just heard the exact cost of what they did, stated plainly, by the person who paid it.

Ferreira put his hand on her arm.

This time she didn't tell him not yet.

She let him.

Outside, the afternoon had gone gray.

Through the chapel's side window, the sky above the parking lot had closed over completely, the kind of flat, even gray that gives nothing away.

The officer's radio crackled.

He stepped away to answer it.

When he came back, he looked at Helena.

"The hospital's legal team has been in contact with the department," he said.

"They've located the records from Vera Souza's final seventy-two hours.

The attending physician is available for a formal interview this evening."