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Camilo couldn't sleep.
There was a gnawing, aching feeling in the pit of his stomach, a knot of dread and guilt. He stared into the dark, unable to close his eyes.
Mirabel was back. Mirabel was alive. Mirabel was safe now. He should be sleeping peacefully now, no?
No.
Especially since he was the one who'd rescued her.
No.
When the truth about where Mirabel had been all this time and who had held her captive had been revealed, Camilo had been hailed as a hero. For the past few weeks, people hadn't stopped congratulating him, praising him, telling him that if not for him-
She would still be there.
He twisted the edge of the blanket in his hand.
When Mirabel had disappeared after Casita had fallen, they'd thought she'd run away.
It would have made sense. She'd just had a big fight with Abuela. Before that, she'd kind of ruined the proposal dinner. Okay, so it turned out that Isabela didn't want to marry Mariano after all, but still. And Antonio, the only one younger than Mirabel, had just gotten his gift. They'd thought that Mirabel, tired of being sidelined and at odds with her family, had run away to make a new life for herself.
They'd hoped she'd run away, because the alternative, the one that was never discussed (within earshot of Camilo, at least - Tia Julieta and Tio Agustin probably broached the possibility with each other) was that she was dead, having fallen in the river with her body swept away, never to be found, or lying at the bottom of a gorge, her neck broken.
For a year and a half, they had had no inkling of what had happened to her, and that was the worst part.
Camilo had walked into the living room once, a few months after Mirabel had vanished, to find his mother, aunt, and Tío Bruno sitting on the couch together, Bruno in the middle, holding both of his sisters' hands.
"I'm sorry," he'd been in the middle of saying. None of the three of them had noticed Camilo. "I'm sorry. I know what I put you through now. I shouldn't have just disappeared. I'm sorry-"
They'd all been crying.
Camilo had bolted out of the room before any of them had seen him.
He blinked hard, squeezing his eyes shut.
None of them had thought she'd been kidnapped.
The Encanto was supposed to be a safe place. A place for only good and deserving people. Not a place for violence or wickedness. Abuelo's sacrifice had made sure of that. The mountains kept all evil out of Encanto. Any sort of crime was almost unheard of.
But the mountains could do nothing when the evil was already inside.
It was Camilo who'd first start getting suspicious about Rafael Gonzalez, six months ago. Six months ago-
A middle-aged bachelor, who lived alone at the edge of the village. He had many casual friends, but no close ones. He was always polite to everyone he met. Kind to the children. Offered a helping hand to anyone who needed one.
He was also the only person in the Encanto who had two locks on the door of his house.
And he carried the keys on a cord around his neck.
He never entertained friends at his house. Very occasionally, he would go to someone else's house, or go with a group to the tavern.
He went to the library regularly, but that had been a recent development. He'd only ever gone once in a while. But suddenly, he began going every single Monday, like clockwork. He would check out two books of any genre - always two books, every single time - and return them next Monday when he checked out two more books.
Sometimes, when passing by the Madrigals, or making a point to come over and make conversation with them, he would have an odd, satisfied smile on his face.
And way back when Mirabel had disappeared, when they'd gone from house to house asking people if they'd seen her, he'd appeared nervous, distracted.
All of these individually could be explained away.
But together....it was strange.
Camilo was good at studying people. He had to be, for his gift. It was all very well to look exactly like, say, Mariano Guzman, but if you didn't walk like he walked, move like he moved, gesture like he gestured, people would notice something was off, and your grandmother would get mad at you for teasing your cousin again.
Camilo had noticed something odd about Rafael Gonzalez months ago. Even back when they'd asked him if he'd seen Mirabel, something about his manner had been strange.
He'd had Mirabel right behind the door, the hand hidden behind the door pointing a knife right at her throat. He'd been the closest to his cousin he would be in months, and he'd had no clue.
Camilo was supposed to notice these things, and he hadn't.
Camilo rolled over in bed, kicking the blanket off of him in a fruitless attempt to get cool.
It had taken him months to notice anything odd about him, and months more to do anything about it-
He remembered how Mirabel had looked when he and Dolores had found her. Bruises all over her face and arms, cheekbones jutting out, eyes haunted and terrified and almost dead.
So much evil and cruelty, all at the hands of only one man-
If the family had still had their gifts, they would have known instantly what had happened to Mirabel. Dolores would have heard her. Bruno would have had a vision.
But the cracks in the family had taken physical form and destroyed Casita, their gifts vanishing with it. And they hadn't gotten them back even when Casita had been rebuilt, because the family had not been whole. Mirabel had not been there. The rift between Mirabel and the family had not been mended.
They'd still had their gifts after Tío Bruno had vanished. But he'd still been there, it turned out, watching them from behind the walls. He hadn't been gone at all.
The new Casita looked exactly like the old one, complete with hidden passageways. Camilo had once found Bruno wandering around in them, walking up down each one, searching. As though making sure his niece had not followed in his footsteps.
Camilo remembered Mirabel sobbing into his shoulder, all the spirit and resistance beaten out of her, as Dolores and Gonzalez had played a deadly dance, him trying to stab her, her trying to keep out of his reach, to grab the arm that held the knife, to get him away from the door for only a moment so he and Mirabel could run for it. Dolores was small and fast and agile, but he was strong - Mirabel's bruises told them that - and he had a knife, and for a moment Camilo had feared that they would all die here.
Well, that he and Dolores would die. Gonzalez would have covered it up somehow, would have hidden their bodies. He hadn't wanted Mirabel to die.
He'd threatened Mirabel with that, with killing her family. He could have done it. He would have had the advantage of surprise. He could have gone over to Dolores and Isabela and Luisa whenever they were going on one of their girls' outings (Mirabel conspicuously absent), walked right up to them with a friendly smile, and taken out the knife and started stabbing. Luisa no longer had superstrength, but even if she'd managed to fight him, there was still Isabela and Dolores.
It took surprisingly little to kill a person. A single stab in the right place, and Dolores or even Luisa would have collapsed, gasping, choking on her own blood as she tried to crawl forward, as her mobility left her, as he moved on to the next target - Mamá? Abuela? Antonio?
He'd been reading up on this, seeing just how close his sister had come to death.
He'd been suspicious for months, and he'd only done something then-
Why couldn't he have come earlier? He and Dolores had broken in at dinnertime! They knew he would be arriving home soon! He should have convinced Dolores earlier, in the morning - six hours earlier - ten minutes earlier - They'd have gotten away safely and Dolores wouldn't have almost died!
Six months-
He pressed the palms of his hands into his eyelids.
The general consensus of the Encanto was that Rafael Gonzalez deserved everything he had coming to him.
When questioned, he had said that while he'd first set his sights on Mirabel when she was eleven (eleven), if he had been unable to take her, he would have taken some other girl.
There was no one in the Encanto who had no daughter, or granddaughter, or sister, or niece. Everyone had reacted with horror and disgust.
Tío Agustín had tried to kill Gonzalez twice, with his bare hands. The guards at the little jail had seen him and had let him walk right in, knowing exactly why he was coming and making no effort to stop him.
It had taken several people combined to pull Agustín off him, his fingers leaving bruises where they'd pried them off of Gonzalez's neck, his knuckles red with the blood gushing from his nose. Agustín had vowed that he would not fail a third time.
It had been unanimously decided that all the assets Rafael Gonzalez owned - everything in his house, the worth of the house itself, all the money he had stored away, which there was a lot of since he'd never spent extra money on anything and had gone to his job all day, every day, having nothing else to occupy himself with until approximately eighteen months ago - would go to Mirabel, as compensation for what she had been through.
And also, Gonzalez was an only child and his parents were dead. He had no family, no heirs....nothing but the child growing within Mirabel.
Camilo clenched his fists, digging his nails into the palm of his hand.
Abuela had requested that, for the time being, no one bother the Madrigals, as Mirabel needed time to recover. The villagers had all agreed. They'd managed without the help of the Madrigals' gifts for a year and a half, they could manage a little longer. No one wanted to be in Mirabel's shoes now, or in the shoes of any of the other Madrigals'. This was every parents' worst nightmare.
But people from the village stopped by, bringing over pans of food, rightly assuming that Julieta would be too busy taking care of Mirabel to cook. They'd offered to have Antonio at their houses for a few days.
The people were all so kind. Everyone had thought Gonzalez was kind, too.
Every one of them had congratulated Camilo, hailing him as a hero.
He was no hero.
"So that's who took those dresses a few years ago!" the owner of Encanto's only boutique had said. "I thought it was some girls who couldn't afford them! I made sure to mark those styles down as half price next week!"
"So that's why he wanted smaller windows!" the owner of Encanto's only construction business had said. "He said the sunlight was bothering him and waking him up too early! I remember wondering why he was spending all that money on new windows when he could've just bought new curtains!"
No one had had a clue-
He remembered the first night after Mirabel's return, all of them sitting in the living room making useless small talk, trying so hard to pretend that everything was normal, just for a moment-
He gritted his teeth.
It was the little things that affected Mirabel. Clothes. Sewing. Books.
Shampoo. I used his, she'd said, but it wasn't enough, he didn't like when I used it up, but he didn't like when my hair was dirty - he liked to - to touch it - when -
A haircut. Luisa and Isabela had given Mirabel the first proper haircut she'd had in a year and a half, and afterwards they'd all fallen asleep together.
The first proper haircut. He cut my hair once. With his knife. He kept pretending he was going to cut me with it. He was laughing.
It had been the little things that had set him off, too, apparently. He'd taken every excuse to rage at Mirabel. He presented such a kind persona to the outside world, and meanwhile inside-
Camilo had seen Mirabel fall to pieces at a dropped plate. Not even cracked, just dropped, and she'd cowered, flinching at every movement.
It had been worse for Mirabel when he was angry. Or drunk. Or both. Besides for hitting her, he would throw things. The bottle. A plate. A chair.
"It didn't always hit me," she'd assured him, as though he was the one who needed to be made to feel better.
Camilo sat up in bed and stared at nothing.
Mirabel wasn't sure how far along she was. Six or seven months, she thought.
Camilo had first noticed something odd about Gonzalez six months ago, but he'd done nothing until now.
Six months, or seven? Six months, or seven?
"You saved my life," Mirabel had told him, and there was something in the way she said it that made his heart shudder. She thanked him over and over.
Julieta had thanked him. Agustín had thanked him. Abuela had thanked him. Random townspeople had thanked him, for otherwise they would never had known what sort of person lay within their midst. His parents had told him he was a hero, brave, clever-
He was nothing of the sort.
Every time someone thanked him, he felt like a hypocrite.
The miracle had only been complete when Mirabel had returned. They'd only gotten their gifts back then. Not before that, because Mirabel had been away from the family, even more disconnected than Bruno had been-
"She thinks this was her punishment for Casita falling," Tía Julieta had sobbed into Mamá's shoulder, for while Mirabel confided everything to her mother, it was too heavy a burden for Julieta to bear alone, so occasionally she would confide in her brother, or sister, or husband, or, sometimes, her aging, guilt-ridden mother.
But they couldn't have gotten their gifts back without Mirabel, and she was unable to return to them, so would they have just remained in limbo forever, Mirabel going through a fate worse than death-
Why, Abuelo? Why was the miracle like this? You died for the family, Abuelo, so we only have a miracle if we are whole, but Mirabel couldn't come back, what did she do to deserve a fate like that? She was fifteen-
Is this really how you wanted to become a bisabuelo?
Six months, or seven?
He'd had months to act-
Camilo had gone back to school a week after Mirabel's return. Everyone had wanted to know how she was doing. Thankfully, nobody had asked any stupid questions. Maybe their own parents had talked to them. Or possibly his mother. Even the teachers had told him to give Mirabel their regards.
He'd felt weird, sitting there in the classroom with all the other kids his age while Mirabel was at home, not a kid anymore in all the wrong ways. She was younger than him.
Sitting here, learning, taking notes, while his cousin's life had changed irrevocably, while she'd been broken and was piecing herself back together, while she'd been trapped right here in town and nobody had known, Gonzalez's neighbors had been so remorseful-
It felt futile, petty. Like it didn't matter.
He didn't know if Mirabel would return to school. She'd missed a year and a half, and he thought she would like to get her diploma with her class, which was also his class, but school was not exactly on Mirabel's list of priorities at the moment.
After Mirabel had vanished but before Antonio had started school, he'd been the only Madrigal in the school, the only time the school had ever contained only one Madrigal. He'd just joked and laughed even more, hiding his loneliness behind humor like he usually did. It had taken the teachers nearly a month to stop automatically saying Mirabel's name when they took attendance, until Camilo, in an uncharacteristic flash of temper, had snapped "When Mirabel comes back, everyone will know."
Antonio had run to catch up with him on the way home that first day back, as he'd been busy introducing Parce to all of his first grade friends, who had all been duly impressed.
"You know what Juancho told me?" Antonio's high-pitched voice had puffed. "He said he heard his papa say that Mirabel's baby is going to be a bastardo-"
"He said what?" Camilo demanded.
"-and that he feels bad for her having to have one, because it's not her fault, because she was as-silt-id." Antonio pronounced it carefully, with all the confidence of a six-year-old saying a new word for the first time. "What's that mean? Juancho didn't know either."
"Ask Mamá," was all Camilo said.
Antonio was the only one of the Madrigals whose feelings about the baby were blissfully uncomplicated and happy, because he was a six-and-a-half year old boy who was excited not to be the youngest anymore.
Mirabel was sixteen.
Six months, or seven?
He'd had his suspicions about Rafael Gonzalez for months, yet had done nothing.
His nails were digging into his palms so hard he almost drew blood.
He hadn't even been certain that Mirabel was in Gonzalez's house. It was just that there was absolutely no trace of where she'd vanished to, so he'd latched on to the slightest oddity in the hope that it would give him a clue as to where Mirabel was. And he'd found her.
When he could have snuck into the house for six months-
"You couldn't have known," his mother, his father, his sister, had told him. "Nobody knew. He was good at lying, good at covering his tracks, he fooled all of us for so long. You had no reason to think Mirabel was really in there. And if he'd realized that you were suspicious of him, he could have hurt Mirabel. You couldn't have known. None of us knew. You rescued her. You have nothing to feel guilty about."
Hurt Mirabel even more than he already had, Camilo had wondered, but he hadn't verbalized it. He knew Gonzalez had had different ways of hurting Mirabel. Not even when he was angry - when he was angry he just went for brute force. But when he was bored, and had no other source of amusement, or was slightly annoyed....He'd seen the scars on Mirabel's arms, long thin ones like those left by the tip of a knife, almost shiny ones like those left from a stovetop fire, small pink ones from a cigarette.
He was pretty sure that the only one who'd gotten a full night's sleep recently was Antonio.
Antonio, whose stuffed jaguar Gonzalez had stolen. Mirabel had tried to escape, and he'd beaten her so badly he'd broken her ribs, and then he'd snuck into the same room Antonio was sleeping in and brought the jaguar back to Mirabel, the message clear: Next time, he wouldn't leave Antonio sleeping unharmed.
Camilo had never hated someone before. Until now. The hatred filled him, filled his veins with a red-hot fire, made his vision blur. Tío Agustin wasn't the only one who wanted Gonzalez dead. But Camilo, like Agustín, wanted to kill him himself - wanted to have the satisfaction of feeling his life leave him, of watching his eyes go wide and desperate, of squeezing his throat between his hands...
He'd never had such violent urges before, and it scared him.
But it distracted him, for a time at least - distracted him from the inescapable guilt knowing that he'd left Mirabel to face six months of torment.
"You saved Mirabel," everyone told Camilo, but why hadn't he done anything sooner?