The rain outside began to beat harder against the glass, a steady, relentless rhythm.

I looked back down at the ledger, my fingers tracing the faded ink.

“Abigail didn’t just buy this land, did she?” I asked.

“No,” Ana said softly. “She destroyed her to get it.”

The door to the hospital room rattled as a gust of wind hit the building.

The lights overhead flickered once, then dimmed, leaving us in the gray twilight of the storm.

“How did she destroy her?” I asked.

Ana turned the page of the ledger.

Her finger moved down a column of hand-written figures.

“Evelyn Vance was a widow,” Ana said.

“She owned the land, but she did not have the capital to develop the agave crops.”

“Abigail offered her a private loan.”

“A private loan?” I asked.

“Yes,” Ana said. “With terms that were designed to fail from the very beginning.”

She pointed to a line of tiny, faded text at the bottom of the page.

It was a clause about immediate forfeiture of the entire property upon a single missed payment.