My mother was in the yard, feeding the chickens corn. When she saw me come in with my tie loosened, my face disheveled, and my eyes blazing, she dropped the tin can from her hands.
—Efraín…
“Tell me the truth,” I blurted out.
My father came out of the kitchen and when he saw us he understood everything without needing words.
My mother paled. She put a hand to her chest. And in a voice I didn’t recognize, she said:
—If Celia has already spoken… then get ready, because you don’t know the worst of it yet.
PART 3
My mother sat down because she could no longer stand up.
Weeping, she told me that twenty years earlier, in the middle of a storm, an elegant woman had arrived at a borrowed house with a baby in her arms, two trusted men, and terror in her eyes. That woman was Celia. The baby was me.
He begged her to take me out of Octavio Beltrán’s life.
He left her money, papers, contacts, but according to my mother, none of that was what convinced her.
“It was the way he let go of you,” he told me. “Like his soul was breaking.”
My father then spoke, firmly, looking me in the eyes:
—I always knew you weren’t related to me by blood. And never, not for a single day, was it hard for me to love you.
That phrase destroyed me more than any DNA test.
Nice story but the whole thing is not coming out.