Alice Gould’s discovery that Heliodoro Almenara had appropriated two inheritances turns a private betrayal into a decision about how to leave a marriage. María Luisa Fernández lays out the sales and withdrawals, but Alice refuses to pursue her husband criminally. The encounter ends not with a promise of revenge but with signed papers for legal separation: Alice chooses to cut the remaining ties rather than make prosecution her form of redress.

The concealed sale of the English houses

María Luisa begins with property Alice believes she still owns: two houses in England, inherited from her father. Alice recalls that the houses once produced some income and that she had sometimes suggested selling them. Heliodoro had opposed the idea, arguing that it would be unwise to part with property abroad. His objection had helped preserve Alice’s belief that the houses remained hers. María Luisa now tells her they were sold eight years earlier, a fact Alice says she did not know.

The transaction did not involve buyers paying Heliodoro directly. María Luisa explains that the money went into Alice and Heliodoro’s joint account, after which he withdrew it. That detail makes the concealment more intimate than a simple unauthorized sale: the proceeds entered an account bearing Alice’s name, yet she did not know either that the houses had been sold or that their value had passed through the shared account. The arrangement also helps explain why the loss had not announced itself to her as a straightforward disappearance of funds.

A larger inheritance and a repeated method

The sale of the English houses proves to be a smaller precedent for a much greater appropriation. Alice says that Obdulio Limón had told her that her current accounts remained as she had left them, a report that deepened her confusion rather than resolving it. María Luisa distinguishes those accounts from a later, substantial deposit made in Alice’s name to the joint account. Heliodoro withdrew that money before twenty-four hours had passed, and María Luisa says there had been no further trace of him.

The source of the deposit is specific: it came from Thompson and Smith, a California law firm, as the proceeds of settling the estate of Harold Gould. Harold had left the inheritance entirely to Alice, his only heir. María Luisa says she has enough information to bring a case and asks Alice to sign a power of attorney so that proceedings can begin. What emerges is a repeated pattern with a marked difference in scale: the proceeds from Alice’s father’s houses were withdrawn from their joint account, and the much larger inheritance from her uncle was handled through that same shared account before Heliodoro took it.

Alice refuses prosecution

Alice does not dispute the substance of María Luisa’s account, but she rejects the legal remedy being offered. She will not sign the authority to prosecute Heliodoro. Her refusal is not presented as ignorance of the loss: she says that she needs a coherent explanation for why she is in the hospital and wants to understand what has happened. Once María Luisa supplies the facts, however, knowing them does not make Alice willing to pursue her husband in court.

Alice interprets Heliodoro’s conduct through a bitterly qualified image: he has behaved like a generous bandit. He took the fortune left by Harold, she says, but partly spared the property inherited from her father. In her reasoning, he could have used the authority he possessed to sell all her properties, yet did not do so. That remaining property becomes, in Alice’s account, a grotesque gesture of generosity from a man who has robbed her. She therefore distinguishes recovering the truth from seeking retribution: she will not make her revenge consist of pursuing and harassing him.

Separation as the chosen break

María Luisa challenges the practical consequences of that refusal. Alice had granted Heliodoro powers intended to let him sell a property in La Mancha; according to María Luisa, he used those powers as well to sell the London houses. Leaving the authority in force, she warns, would allow him to remain her heir and preserve a connection Alice has no reason to maintain. María Luisa accepts that Alice may prefer not to prosecute him, but proposes a different exchange: Alice’s decision not to denounce him in return for immediate legal separation and a future divorce.

The proposal turns Alice’s withdrawal from prosecution into a concrete act of separation. María Luisa says she will arrange the matter and asks Alice only to sign the papers. Alice accepts the contemptuous comparison María Luisa has made, reducing Heliodoro to a trivial speck of bird droppings, and signs. As she does so, she laments that they have no champagne at hand to celebrate. The gesture gives the scene its double edge: the losses remain real, but Alice treats the severing of the marital bond as a release worth marking. The immediate outcome is legal separation, with divorce still in the future; the decisive change is that Alice agrees to end the tie without agreeing to prosecute the man who betrayed her.