Miguel managed to finish dinner, but the detail about Daniel telling Lucia to keep anything from him altered the situation again. He did not assume the worst beyond what he knew, yet he could no longer accept Sofia's claim that Lucia had been entirely outside the affair. A child who had been coached, even lightly, to protect an adult's presence had already been involved. He decided before they left the restaurant that he would speak to a family therapist before asking Lucia any more questions. He did not want to interrogate his own daughter until memory became performance.
That night Miguel slept in the guest room. He removed Daniel's toothbrush from the bathroom himself, sealed it in a plastic bag without quite knowing why, then laughed at the absurdity and threw it in the trash. He found no hidden suitcase, no men's clothing, no second phone. In the bedroom drawer, however, he found a small hotel key sleeve from Galveston dated four months earlier. That meant the affair had not been confined to the house. He photographed it and put it back because some instinct told him not to destroy evidence of his own life before he understood whether he would need it.
Sofia stood in the doorway watching him. "There are no more surprises," she said. Miguel looked at the key sleeve in his hand. "You don't get to know that better than I do anymore."
He asked for her phone.
She resisted for less than a minute before unlocking it and placing it on the dresser. Most of the recent message thread with Daniel had been deleted. The absence itself was information. There were fragments in archived email, calendar entries disguised as vendor meetings, and one photograph of a wine glass on a hotel balcony where Daniel's hand was visible at the edge. Miguel did not read endlessly. After twenty minutes he set the phone down because information had stopped clarifying and started injuring.