Rafael Costa had been carrying a specific guilt for six years.
Not a dramatic guilt. Not the kind that announced itself or required management. The quiet, durable kind that settled into the architecture of your working life and became indistinguishable from the walls — present always, visible only when the light hit a certain way.
He'd known, in November six years ago, that something was wrong with the Vasconcelos surrogacy arrangement. He'd known it the way a lawyer knew things — not provably, not with documentation, but with the particular instinct of someone who had processed too many contracts and too many clients to mistake the smell of something constructed to misdirect.
He'd told himself it wasn't his place. That he didn't have evidence. That Leonardo, at that point, was in a ver
