I was moments away from signing a document I couldn’t read in German—until the cleaning lady’s daughter intervened.
The young partner let out a nervous giggle.
—Please… are we seriously going to listen to a little girl? This is ridiculous.
The older one, however, changed color slightly. His fingers gripped the edge of the table.
Hans felt a chill. Until that moment, he had tried to ignore the knot in his stomach. He had trusted. But hearing a ten-year-old girl talk about clauses and assignments as if they were part of her math homework stirred something deep within him.
“What do you mean I lose my right to complain?” he asked, without taking his eyes off the contract.
Lina pointed to the document shyly.
—Can I see it again?
Hans turned the contract toward her. The girl leaned forward, frowned, and began to read aloud in perfect German, then translated it into Spanish word for word, without hesitating.
—“The signatory hereby fully and irrevocably transfers all present and future rights over the assets located in Colombian territory… waiving all judicial or administrative action… and accepting penalties in case of termination…” —he translated.
The pen slipped from Hans’s fingers.
That wasn’t a minor detail. It was a trap.
He looked at his partners. The smiles were gone. The bearded man was rubbing his hands together, the young man was clenching his jaw.
“You knew I don’t read legal German,” Hans said, his voice low and dangerous. “Why didn’t you ever explain this to me?”
“It’s a simple wording detail,” the bearded man tried. “A technical term. It doesn’t change the essence of the agreement.”
“A detail?” Hans repeated, feeling the memory of his father rise like a ghost from the past. “My dad lost his land over ‘a small detail’ that no one explained to him. He signed trustingly. And he died regretting it.”
For a second, the room ceased to be an elegant boardroom and became the dry countryside of his childhood: the paper on the kitchen table, the cheap pen, the peasant signing what he did not understand.
Hans felt an old rage, accumulated over years.
Rosa, standing in the doorway, didn’t know whether to stay or run away. She apologized repeatedly, but Hans raised his hand.
“Your daughter hasn’t bothered me, ma’am,” he said, looking at Lina gratefully. “She’s saved me.”
The girl shifted uncomfortably in her chair. She wasn’t seeking attention; she had simply read something that made no sense.
The young partner slammed his fist on the table.
“This is an exaggeration!” he shouted. “We’re about to make you an important figure in Europe, and now you’re going to throw it all away because some brat read a line out of context.”
The older man tried to calm him, whispering in German, but Hans had already changed inside. Something had shifted. For the first time in a long time, he didn’t feel “grateful to be there”: he felt cheated.
He picked up his phone.
“Maria,” she said when her assistant answered. “I need a certified legal translator in this room in less than an hour. And call the Bar Association as well. This needs to be reviewed.”
He hung up without waiting for a response and looked at the executives.
“If everything is as clean as they said,” he added, “they won’t have any problem waiting.”
The young man snorted.
“You’re making a huge mistake,” he spat. “Without our investment, your project in Colombia will sink. You need us more than we need you.”
Hans let him speak. He knew that, until that morning, all of it had been true. The project was on the brink, the banks were putting pressure on him, costs were rising. He himself, a week ago, had said resignedly: “without them, there is no future.”
But now I understood something else: no future was worth it if it was built by surrendering your soul.
The minutes dragged on. No one spoke. Rosa squeezed her daughter’s hand, wanting to take her away, but Hans asked her to stay. Lina was now the key to something she hadn’t even imagined.
When the translator finally arrived —an older woman with rectangular glasses and a stern expression—, the executives shifted uncomfortably.
“I don’t think this is necessary,” the bearded partner tried. “We can review this another time. The contract has already been approved by our legal department. There’s no…”
“If there’s nothing to hide,” Hans interrupted, “reading it again shouldn’t be a problem.”
The translator took the document. At first her brow furrowed slightly; then her face hardened.
“This is not a collaboration agreement,” he stated clearly after a few minutes. “It’s a complete transfer of assets with very aggressive clauses. Penalties, waiver of claims, even authorization to use your name in unspecified transactions.”
He looked up at Hans.
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