Page 40 of An Immaculate Deception

“You sent me all those letters, while this is what you were doing this whole time. You’re a disgrace, you should be ashamed of yourself! You walk around composed and reserved, but then you do vile things in this house and you lied to my face when I asked if someone had slept in that room recently.”

“Sinhá Madalena, stop!” Maria das Dores says from the hallway.

Her voice breaks me from my frenzy. I draw back from Leandro, out of breath.

“You’ve always been against me!” I point a finger at her. My head is hot with fury. She is just like Doctor Lobo, always taking Leandro’s side. Why does everyone take Leandro’s side? Even Maria das Dores, always looking at me sideways…Wait…Is this why she’s always been so guarded around me?

“Did you know about this?”

“Know about what?”

“Does he bed you, too?”

“What?”

“Does he photograph you naked, too?”

Maria das Dores clasps a hand to her mouth, black eyes wide with horror, then slowly backs away from us.

“She is innocent,” Leandro says. “She is old enough to be my grandmother.”

“And still I wouldn’t put it past you.”

Even now, she’s looking at me as if I’m a wild beast. But Leandro deserves so much more than this. Leandro cradles his shoulder, but there is not even a bruise. Two lives he ruined, mine and my baby’s.

I toss the candlestick to the ground. Already my life-giving rage is deflating into a hollow, abject desolation.

“It was all lies. Everything you said in the letters, all lies. You lied and lied and lied…”

“I didn’t!” he cries out.

“I have the proof right here.” I spin on my heel and reach for the photographs. Already I feel the satisfaction in my veins of knowing that I will hurl the photograph in his face, and he will pale when he sees proof. I scan the mess of photographs quickly for the obscene one.

I find it. “Look at this and tell me—”

The words die in my throat. As I pick up the photo, I notice something I failed to notice before.

Her nakedness, her obscene posture, so shocked me at first that I had hardly noticed her face. Here she is looking at the camera head-on, laughing at the photographer, like Leandro is her plaything.

Her face is youthful and oval, her lips heart shaped, her nose tiny and straight.

I know this face.

23

The air feels thin. My knees give and I sink onto the bed. I am painfully aware of Leandro watching me.

I thought maybe she had been long dead and was haunting these walls. I thought Leandro kept her a prisoner in the senzala. I thought Leandro might even have killed her, but it wasn’t Leandro who killed her. It wasn’t even Doctor Lobo who killed her.

It was me.

But it’s not entirely my fault…she was already unconscious when I stabbed her with the ceremonial knife. She didn’t cry out or move. Doctor Lobo must have done something to her. He tricked me.

So…these past few days, while Doctor Lobo was visiting us, taking care of us, this whole time he had her locked up in his secret chamber.

My forehead feels clammy.

I look at Leandro. Does he know that Doctor Lobo kidnapped his lover? It doesn’t seem like it.