“Your mother married him because her parents wanted it,” Don Ernesto continued. “He had a better family name. I had nothing. I fixed bicycles and slept in the back of my uncle’s shop. She tried to be a good wife. I stayed away. Then one day she came to me crying. Rafael had disappeared for weeks. She had no money. No food. She was alone.” His voice lowered. “We made a mistake.”
I looked at him. “I was the mistake?”
His eyes shot to mine. “No. The lie was the mistake. You were the only beautiful thing that came from that pain.”
I looked away, breathing hard.
“When she found out she was pregnant, Rafael returned. He knew the dates. He knew. He beat her. Then he left again. Her family told her if anyone learned the child was mine, they would throw her out. They said I had ruined her. She begged me not to claim you because she believed you would suffer for it. She said a boy needs a name people respect.” He laughed softly, without humor. “As if respect had ever fed a child.”
I sat down again because my legs had weakened.
“I wanted to take both of you,” he said. “I begged her. But she was afraid. Afraid of scandal. Afraid of poverty. Afraid Rafael would come back and hurt us. So I stayed nearby. I brought food when I could. I fixed things. I watched you grow from doorways and market corners.” His lips trembled. “When she got sick, she finally told me if anything happened to her, I should take you. But she made me promise not to tell you unless you asked.”
“I was ten.”
“I know.”
“What ten-year-old asks for a DNA test?”
He lowered his head. “I know.”
Anger rose again, but this time it had nowhere clean to go. My mother was gone. Rafael was a ghost. My relatives were cowards. Don Ernesto was guilty and innocent in the same breath, which is the hardest kind of truth to hate. He had lied to me, yes. But he had also stayed when every easier path led away.
“You let people call you a fool,” I said.
He smiled sadly. “I had been called worse.”
“You let me think you chose me even though I wasn’t yours.”
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