It was as if he didn’t actually want to take the call. He would not have been unhappy if time were to stand still, and he would never have to face putting the phone to his ear. Ever since he had been called out of the meeting with an urgent ‘Carlos, there’s a call for you from the hospital. Something’s happened to your family,’ he had feared, with an almost unreal sense of dread, the moment in which some stranger, most likely a doctor, would provide him with further details. “Yes...” “Is this Carlos Miranda?” “Yes, speaking.” “Listen... your wife and daughter have been involved in a very serious traffic accident. You should come to the hospital as soon as possible...” He did not ask any questions, and he did not wait for any more explanations. He hung up the phone and looked all around him, at the familiar faces with puzzled expressions, and came to the sudden realisation that this moment marked the beginning of a journey that was to be long and dark. Somehow, Carlos knew that everything that had happened in his life until that point was now rendered worthless: that the new circumstances in which he found himself were going to require him to take on a new identity, and that this new person he would become was going to find little in the way of support from his previous life experiences.
