“What’s your name?” Mateo asked.
“Pablo,” the boy replied, shrinking back slightly when he noticed Daniela. “And yours?”
Daniela felt a sharp pain in her stomach. She forced herself to breathe.
“Excuse me, Pablo…” she said carefully, as if walking on thin ice. “Where are your parents?”
Pablo looked down and pointed to a nearby bench. There, a thin woman, around fifty years old, slept clutching an old bag. Her clothes were dirty and her face was tired, as if life had weighed more heavily on her than it should have.
“Aunt Consuelo takes care of me,” Pablo murmured. “But sometimes she gets sick.”
Daniela pressed her lips together. Something inside her screamed that this wasn’t a coincidence. But another part of her, the part that had survived the depression of the first months of motherhood, wanted to run away. To keep the mystery. To return to the familiar life, even if it was built on questions.
“Mateo,” she said, taking his hand more tightly than necessary. “We’re leaving. Now.”
Mateo turned away, his eyes brimming with tears, as if something were being ripped from him.
“I don’t want to leave. I want to stay with my brother.”
“He’s not your brother,” she blurted out, too quickly. “You don’t have any brothers.”
“Yes, I do,” Mateo cried. “I know I do. He talks to me every night.”
Pablo came closer and touched his arm with a tenderness unusual for a child who lived on the streets.
“Don’t cry… I don’t like it when we’re apart either.”
Daniela scooped Mateo up in her arms, ignoring his protests, and walked away with hurried steps. But even from a distance, she felt Pablo’s gaze following them, and she saw—or thought she saw—a tear roll down his dirty cheek.
In the car, Mateo repeated over and over, like a hammer, “Why did you leave my brother alone, Mom? Why?”
Daniela drove with trembling hands. The plaza was receding into the distance, but Pablo’s face remained, etched in her mind. And with it, those strange gaps in her memories of the birth: the anesthesia, the silence, waking up with Mateo in her arms, and an inexplicable feeling of absence, as if something hadn’t quite clicked.
“What happened?”
“Nothing,” she lied. “Mateo threw a tantrum.”
“It wasn’t a tantrum!” Mateo shouted, running to his father. “Dad! I saw my brother. He was selling candy in the plaza, and Mom wouldn’t let me stay.”
Ricardo let out a laugh that died instantly when he saw Daniela trembling.
“Champ… you don’t have any brothers.”
“Yes, I do. He looks just like me. You tell him, Mom.”
That night, when Mateo finally fell asleep, Daniela opened an old folder with medical papers. She reread everything. Nothing mentioned a multiple pregnancy. But the memories of that day were riddled with holes, like a cut film. And that emptiness—that damned emptiness—now took the shape of a barefoot boy.
The next morning, Mateo refused to eat breakfast.
“I want to see my brother,” he kept repeating.
Ricardo tried to calm him down, but Daniela couldn’t anymore. Something inside her, for the first time in years, stopped running away.
“Let’s go to the plaza,” she said.
Ricardo looked at her as if he didn’t recognize her. “Are you sure?”
“No. But I need to know.”
In the plaza, Pablo was sitting alone with a piece of stale bread. There was no sign of Aunt Consuelo.
Mateo ran out and hugged him as if he were reunited with a part of himself.
Ricardo was speechless. “My God… Daniela… you’re identical.”
Daniela nodded, feeling a mixture of fear and hope.
“Where’s Aunt Consuelo?” Mateo asked.
“She went to the hospital last night,” Pablo replied, his eyes swollen. “I don’t know when she’ll be back.”
Ricardo crouched down in front of the boy. “Are you five years old?”
“I think so. Aunt Consuelo said I was born on the day there are fireworks in the sky.”
Daniela went pale.
“Mateo was born on New Year’s Eve,” she whispered.
The world stood still for a second. Then, as if someone had pushed over a set of dominoes, everything began to fall.
They went to the hospital. After some insistence, a records clerk—Doña Guadalupe—found the birth file. Pages were missing. And on one page, barely visible, something written in pencil: “multiple pregnancy.” Erased. As if someone had wanted to erase the truth as well.
“Who could touch these files?” Daniela asked.
“Immediate family… her husband… her mother… her mother-in-law,” Doña Guadalupe replied.
Doña Esperanza’s name appeared like a shadow.
Doña Esperanza: the elegant, rigid, controlling mother-in-law. The same woman who, that day at the hospital, “helped with the paperwork” for hours while Daniela was unconscious. The same woman who always claimed to know what was “best for the family.”
Daniela felt a chill run through her veins.
