28. Ten Years
Chapter twenty-eight
Ten Years
Nova
The chapel at noon.
Not the main room. The chapel — Eduardo's chapel, where Preach lit candles every morning, where the amber light came through the stained glass and made the room feel like something that had always been standing and would continue to stand. Where my father had died.
The choice of location was deliberate. If we were going to have this conversation, it needed to happen in the place where the ten years were rooted.
I had Bishop's binder. I had Colt's note about the thesis.
I had Diego's text about the gym. I had sat in this room for four days with all three of those facts and had come to the other side of them in the specific way that I came through things that required sustained confrontation — fully, not quickly, with all of the weight acknowledged.
I was ready.
I had carried the founding document with me.
Not a copy — the actual document from the case file, the one Eduardo had signed in 2003, the one Bishop had preserved in a safety deposit box and that Vance had never known still existed.
I had read the preamble this morning: The purpose of this organization is the welfare of its members and the communities that sustain them.
The sentence from which everything else derived.
Eduardo's absolute belief in plain language.
I had sat with the founding document in the pew for twenty minutes before sending the texts, letting the chapel and the document and the fact of my father's death in this room become the ground I was standing on. The ground was solid. I had needed it to be entirely solid before I spoke.
I had been sitting in the pew for twenty minutes before I sent the texts.
Needed the chapel to be settled before they arrived — needed to be in it long enough that the room's particular quality had moved from symbol to space.
Preach's morning candles, still burning.
The smell of old wood and candle wax and the specific quiet of a space that had been used for decades for the purpose of sitting with hard things.
My father had died here. That fact was in the room the way old facts were in old rooms — not stated, not performed, simply present in the material of the walls and the quality of the silence.
I had needed to be in the room with the fact before I could say what I was going to say.
I sent the texts at ten. They arrived at noon.
Colt first, from the back — the door he used when he was entering the chapel for a purpose rather than habit, the one that put him at the wall where he could see the full room before committing to it.
He read the chapel in three seconds, the way he read all rooms: entries, exits, positions of people, likely movement patterns. He found the right-side pew and stood.
Diego next, through the side door. He came in with the particular quality he had when he knew something important was about to happen and he was not going to perform anything — not preparation, not composure. Just himself, present, attending.
Bishop last, through the main entrance. He came in and stood near the back, close enough to hear clearly, with the space between himself and me that was the space he kept when he was not sure what he would be received as.
I stood at the front.
I said: "You waited ten years. You let me grow up thinking it was a rival club. You let me grieve the wrong story. You parented me in spreadsheets."
My voice was even.
I looked at Bishop when I said the last part.
"You put me on a desk and called it love. And now you want me to trust you with the real one."
The chapel absorbed the words.
Nobody argued.
"I am not asking you to defend yourselves," I said. "I am asking you to tell me what you want me to understand."
Diego spoke first. He was sitting in the left pew, his forearms on his knees, his hands loose — the posture of someone who was not going to protect himself from what was being said.
"I won't tell you we were right," he said.
"I'll tell you we were what we knew how to be.
I was fourteen when found me. I knew something was wrong with the official story — I'd known something was wrong with Vance for months before the murder, the way you know things in your body before your mind makes them available.
I didn't have the framework to act on it.
I built the framework over the next decade.
" He paused. "I am sorry for the years you didn't have the truth.
I cannot give those years back. I can give you the rest."
Colt: "I waited because I needed you to choose.
" He said it directly — not apology, not justification, the flat honesty of a man who was done managing information around the other people in the room.
"Not inherit. Choose. I believed that if you came back to the compound without knowing about the murder, and you chose to be here anyway, the choice would mean something that a choice made under full information would have meant differently.
I see now that the full information was yours to have, and I denied it to protect a frame I preferred.
" He paused. "I was wrong about the timing. "
Bishop.
He looked at me for a moment before he spoke. The composure on, but under it, visible to me now in a way it hadn't been before the office and the ledger and the week of sitting with the binder, something that had been there for ten years and had never had a room to be in.
"I have been reading your school emails since you arrived at the compound," he said.
"Every advisor note. Every draft chapter.
Every message from Dr. Rivera about your thesis progress and your submission timeline.
I did not tell you I was doing this. I don't apologize for it, it was done in service of the counter-operation, in service of knowing how close you were to finding things that would put you at risk.
I am telling you now because you should know what I've been.
" He paused. "I am sorry I made you a model before you were a person.
I'm sorry the math was right and the love was wrong. "
The chapel was quiet.
The amber light came through the stained glass on the afternoon angle, the light that was warmest between two and four on winter and early spring afternoons, the light I had grown up looking at on Sunday mornings when my mother brought me to the compound for church.
"I need to be alone," I said.
They left.
One at a time. Diego through the side door. Colt through the back. Bishop last, pausing at the entrance for a moment with his back to me, not performing the pause, just present in it, and then moving.
I stood in the chapel alone.
I stood in the chapel after they left.
The morning light had moved. What had been amber was now gold, the afternoon angle coming through the stained glass on the south wall, the light shifting with the hour the way it did in this room, the room oriented by Eduardo when he built it so that the light was always moving, always changing, so that the space itself marked time rather than standing outside it.
My father had understood something about sitting with hard facts in changing light. He had built a room that made you do it.
I stood until the light changed again.
Ten years had passed in this chapel. Preach had lit the candles through all of it. The room had been here, holding the time, waiting for whatever came next.
What came next was me.
I thought about the founding document, the language he had used in the preamble, the specific phrases that had gotten into my thesis because I had read the document fifty times and the language had become part of my thinking before I noticed I was using it.
The welfare of its members and the communities that sustain them.
The community-first framing that was not rhetoric but structural commitment, the way the governance model enforced it, the financial transparency provisions that made it legible, the audit mechanisms that were supposed to prevent exactly what had happened.
He had built the provisions. He had died before they could be used.
I was going to use them.
My father had died in this room.
He had died knowing the rules he had built were being broken, knowing who was breaking them, knowing what the consequence of confrontation would be.
He had walked into it anyway because that was what presidents did and because he was Eduardo Santos and Eduardo Santos did not flinch from the accounting that was required of him.
I was his daughter.
My phone rang.
Rosa.
I answered.
"Mom."
"I'm here." The quiet on her end, her kitchen, probably, or the library. The specific hush of a space organized for thought. "Come when you're ready. Key is under the gnome."
"I know," I said.
She waited. The particular skill she had, the pause that was presence rather than pressure.
"I know," I said again.
"Okay," she said. "Rest."
She stayed on the line for another ten seconds without speaking.
Then she said, "Go rest, mija," and hung up.
I stood in the chapel.
Houston was real. The gnome was real. The option was real. I could get in the car tonight and be at my mother's table by morning and the thesis would still be written and the baby would still be growing and I would have made the choice to step out of this.
I looked at the photograph of Eduardo that hung in the chapel, a different photograph than the one in the office.
This one was Eduardo at the founding, the five-man club in a garage, Eduardo at thirty with the founding document in his hands and the look on his face that was the look of someone who has just committed to something and knows it is the right commitment.
He had not stepped out.
I stood in the chapel for another twenty minutes after they left.
The floor was poured concrete beneath the boards. I had noticed that the first week, the weight of it, the way the building sat heavier on the earth than a chapel should, continuous with the day's passage, oriented toward what came next.
What came next was the cabin.
I thought about the founding document, which I was carrying, which I had carried here for this conversation and which was now in my hands again. Eduardo's language. The welfare of its members and the communities that sustain them. The preamble sentence that organized everything else.
The three men who had just left this chapel were his members. The compound, the gym, the boxing program, the streets around it, those were the communities.
I was his daughter.
The sentence organized me too.
I went to the vestibule and took the cabin key.
They would know I had it. The keys hung in the public space.
I let them know.