With you.
I felt my ears ringing.
-No.
—Yes, Efraín.
-No.
—You are that son.
Everything inside me shattered.
I laughed, but not with laughter: with horror.
—You’re sick.
“I didn’t recognize you at first,” she blurted out, as if trying to catch me off guard before I exploded. “When I met you at the house, I just saw a good, intelligent, noble young man… and I approached him. Then I started noticing dates, stories, gestures. I had someone investigate. Eight months ago, I learned the truth.”
I looked at her the way you look at someone who has just set your life on fire.
—Eight months ago? And you still married me?
Celia lowered her head.
—I tried to push you away.
—Not enough!
“No,” she admitted, broken. “Not enough.”
I hated her for saying it so honestly, because it took away my comfort from simply calling her a monster.
—And the bodyguards?
—They’re for Octavio. He’s still alive. And if he finds out who you are, he can use you.
The phrase pierced me.
Not only had he let me fall in love, he had also, without saying a word, thrust me into the heart of a war he had been waiting for for twenty years.
“And my mother?” I asked, my throat tight. “The woman who raised me?”
Celia took a deep breath.
—She knew.
That answer ripped the ground out from under my feet.
-No.
—Yes. Her name is Rosaura. I entrusted your life to her one early morning. She was the only decent person near me at that time. She raised you to save you.
I couldn’t take it anymore.
I grabbed my jacket, left my keys, left the envelope, left everything. I left that room as if the walls were pushing me back. I walked for hours until I ended up sitting at a roadside gas station, still in my suit, watching trucks go by and wondering how many times a man can break in a single night.
I arrived home at dawn.
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.
