28
DANTE
Augusto asked to talk to me after his interview with the review team.
The request came late Monday. He didn’t use the shared calendar, nor did he ask my assistant to find a time slot. He called me directly and said he wouldn’t leave the building without speaking to me.
“You can come up at six,” I replied.
Before that, I spoke with Eunice.
The investigation had moved forward since the message found in the finance department’s mailbox.
The full thread preserved in the corporate archive confirmed that Rubens had sent Augusto a version of the material intended for the press before publication.
Augusto had replied with a correction to one figure.
The table matched the one partly reproduced in the article.
This still didn’t clarify all the expenses or the path each piece of private information had taken. But it ruled out the possibility that my brother was simply unaware of the contact.
He had also acknowledged in the interview that the signed receipt described a loan. He had claimed that he had considered the transaction suspicious despite the document.
Eunice showed me the record of the reply.
I read it twice.
“He admits he knew.”
“He acknowledges how the transaction was documented at the time. His interpretation of everything else is a separate question.”
I stared at the sheet of paper.
The omission of the receipt was documented. The rest still needed to be clarified; I wanted to hear what Augusto would say when he could no longer deny his own signature.
Eunice explained what still needed to remain within the investigation. I said I wouldn’t disclose anything about Marina or seek an informal account in exchange for ending the review.
When she left, I left on the table only the documents I myself had received from Cecília and my notes from past conversations.
At six o’clock, Augusto walked in without knocking.
He closed the door behind him.
“This has become humiliating,” he said.
I remained seated.
“Sit down.”
He looked at the chair, then at the papers.
“How many more times are they going to ask me about the same transfer?”
“As many times as it takes to clear things up.”
Augusto let out a short laugh.
“Are you enjoying talking to me like this?”
“No.”
The answer came effortlessly. I wasn’t enjoying a single thing in that room.
He sat down, pulling the chair back farther than necessary.
“I signed a receipt. You’ve seen it. I haven’t denied that to anyone.”
I pushed a copy toward him.
“You didn’t show it to me when you used the transfer to accuse Cecília.”
“Because the receipt didn’t change anything.”
I looked at my brother.
“It said ‘loan,’ Augusto.”
“She could call it whatever she wanted.”
“You signed it.”
He ran his hand over his face, impatiently.
“I helped her. Then I saw things that made me suspicious. One thing doesn’t rule out the other.”
“You didn’t say you were suspicious. You said you knew she’d sold information.”
Augusto looked away toward the window.
I waited.
“You were willing to believe anything she said,” he replied at last.
I felt a tightness in my chest.
“At the altar, I didn’t believe a thing.”
“Before. I’m talking about before. You took everything to her. Opinions on suppliers, family conversations, plans for the company. Suddenly, someone who barely understood our contracts thought she could tell us how we should work.”
Cecília asking a question about prices. Me forwarding it to my brother. The easy answer he’d given back.
“She asked a question,” I said.
“She was interfering.”
Augusto leaned forward, as he did when he wanted to convince me of something he considered obvious.
“You didn’t realize how much you’d changed. I had to make you see.”
The air seemed to stand still in the room.
“Make me see what?”
He realized the implications of his own words. I could tell by the way he straightened up.
“The risk of giving your whole life to someone without thinking.”
“So you chose what to show me.”
“I organized what was relevant.”
“You left out the receipt.”
“I didn’t include the receipt. That’s not the same as fabricating a transfer.”
I rested my hands on the table so I wouldn’t stand up.
For five years, my brother had had that distinction to fall back on. The money had existed, so he could defend the story he’d built around it. Cecília had signed a piece of paper, but he’d decided I didn’t need to see it.
“That’s a convenient distinction for you,” I said.
Augusto clenched his jaw.
“Do you want to blame me for everything now?”
“No. For what you did.”
He stood up.
“I didn’t stand at that altar. I didn’t say those things. You did.”
The words hit me with the precision of someone who knew exactly where to strike.
I stood up too, slowly.
“I did. I’m responsible for that. You’re responsible for showing me a loan as proof she’d sold information.”
“You’re reducing an entire situation to a single word on paper.”
“And you reduced a person to a bank transfer.”
We stared at each other for a few seconds.
There was an old photograph of the two of us on the bookshelf behind him. I didn’t need to turn around to know where it was. We were in our early twenties, still believing that working together was the natural continuation of everything we’d experienced.
“You knew about Rubens’s contact with the press,” I said.
Augusto froze.
“That’s being handled by the team.”
“Yes. And that will continue. I’m saying you knew. You corrected a figure in the material before publication. Even so, you pointed to her when I asked where it had come from.”
“Correcting a number isn’t the same as ordering a story.”
“No one said anything about ordering.”
He took a deep breath.
“I’m not discussing documents outside the investigation if you’re going to turn everything I say into an accusation.”
I nodded.
“Then don’t. Cooperate with the investigation.”
My brother picked up the phone on the table, even though he hadn’t received any calls. He put it in his pocket and looked at me with an expression I’d known since I was a child: that of someone who felt betrayed because I wouldn’t go along with him.
“Do you really think you’re going to rebuild anything with her by destroying your family?”
Bento’s name came to mind. I kept it there.
Augusto would not learn about him in the middle of a fight.
“Cecília hasn’t asked me to have this conversation. I’m looking at what you did to me, too.”
He turned his face away.
For a moment, I thought he might finally say something without defending himself. A small admission, perhaps a recognition that he’d crossed a line he couldn’t erase with a sentence.
Instead, he said:
“I’ve always been on your side.”
I felt sadness before anger. A deep, long-standing sadness at realizing how much I had trusted that phrase without asking which side it left everyone else on.
“Today, I don’t know what that means to you.”
Augusto looked toward the door.
“When you calm down, we’ll talk.”
“The review will continue. That doesn’t depend on me calming down.”
He left.
***
I stood there for a few minutes.
The urge to break something came and passed without landing on an object.
Then I sat down and wrote out the conversation while I still remembered the sequence.
I separated the exact words I was sure of from my general recollections.
I sent the account to Eunice through the agreed channel, making clear that this was my memory of the argument, not a recording.
There was an admission: he’d chosen not to show me the receipt. There was a justification: he’d needed to make me see. The rest required work I couldn’t finish in that room.
I looked at my phone.
Cecília needed to know that my brother had admitted to the omission, but she didn’t need to receive a call from me while I was still seething with anger.
I wrote that some important information had come up during my conversation with Augusto and that I’d like to share it—with Clarice, if she preferred.
I asked what time would be convenient the next day.
She replied that she could talk at 10, after the bakery opened, and asked me to let Clarice know about the documents.
I confirmed.
Only then did I gather up the papers.
On the bookshelf, the photograph was still in the same spot. My brother had his arm around my shoulder, and the two of us were laughing at something outside the frame.
I turned my face toward the door through which he had left.
I didn’t yet know what would be left between us. I knew I would no longer call it protection when the truth was chosen to keep me from seeing more.