Chapter 3: What Alejandro Had Always Known
He didn't move from the doorway.
He just stood there, one hand braced against the frame, watching my face with an expression I had never seen on him before.
Not guilt exactly.
Something older than guilt.
Something that had been waiting a long time to be seen.
"How long?" I said.
My voice came out steadier than I felt.
Lucy was still in the water, very still, her eyes moving between us.
"Mariana—"
"How long have you known, Alejandro?"
He stepped into the bathroom and lowered himself onto the edge of the small bench near the window.
He laced his fingers together.
He looked at them.
"Three months," he said.
The word landed like something dropped from a height.
"Three months." I set the sponge on the rim of the tub.
My hands had stopped shaking.
Something colder had replaced the shaking.
"You have known for three months that this woman might be my mother, and you said nothing to me."
"I wasn't certain."
"You were certain enough to go find her."
He looked up.
"I needed to be sure before I brought it to you.
I didn't want to put you through that kind of hope and then have it fall apart."
"That was not your decision to make."
Lucy made a small sound.
We both turned.
She had drawn her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, making herself as small as possible in the large tub.
Her eyes were wet.
"I'm sorry," she said softly.
"I don't want to cause pain between you."
"You haven't caused anything," I said.
I meant it.
I turned back to Alejandro.
"Start from the beginning.
All of it."
He was quiet for a moment.
Then he nodded.
"It started with a file," he said.
"One of my site managers flagged an old land dispute on a property we were acquiring on the south side.
The previous owner's records went back thirty years.
When I pulled the full chain of title, one of the names on an early deed was Elena Vasquez." He paused.
"Your mother's name."
I hadn't heard that name spoken aloud in years.
Elena Vasquez.
My grandmother had said it like a wound she was trying not to reopen.
"The deed listed a residential address," Alejandro continued.
"I had our legal team trace it.
The address had changed hands four times.
But one of the neighbors from that block — an older woman, still living there — remembered a young woman named Elena who had lived there with a small daughter.
She said Elena had been in an accident.
A bad one.
Near one of the construction sites on Halsted, around twenty years ago."
Lucy's chin lifted slightly.
"She said the woman had been found wandering," Alejandro said.
"No identification.
Severe head trauma.
She was taken to County.
After a few weeks, when no one claimed her, she was transferred to a transitional care facility.
And then she was just…
passed along.
From one system to the next.
For twenty years."
The bathroom was very quiet.
"I hired an investigator," Alejandro said.
"It took six weeks to trace the path from that facility to where she ended up.
The soup kitchen was the last known location." He looked at Lucy gently.
"I went there myself because I didn't want to send someone else."
Lucy was looking at him with an expression I couldn't fully read.
Not gratitude exactly.
Recognition, maybe.
Like something she had felt before but couldn't name.
"Why didn't you tell me any of this?" I asked.
"Six weeks of investigation and you said nothing."
"Because I watched you your whole life carry the weight of not knowing what happened to her.
I watched you wear that locket every single day.
I didn't want to be the person who told you we found her and then have the DNA come back wrong." He met my eyes.
"I wanted to hand you something real.
Not another maybe."
I stood up from where I had been kneeling beside the tub.
"We still don't know for certain," I said.
My voice cracked on the last word.
"No," he said.
"We don't."
Lucy looked down at the water.
Then she said, very quietly, "The child in that dream.
She always smells like lavender."
I stopped breathing.
My grandmother had washed my hair with lavender soap until I was twelve years old.
I had never told Alejandro that.
I had never told anyone.
I looked at the locket still open in my palm.
The young woman in the photograph.
The infant.
May you like
Lucy raised her eyes to mine.
And something in her face — something underneath the years and the damage and the forgetting — looked exactly like looking in a mirror.
