But in the corner of the photo, written in blue ink, was my full name.
It was me.
Not a little girl who looked like me.
Not a coincidence.
Me.
On the back of the photo, it said:
“Natalie Rios Morales. Three months old. Daughter of Raul. My granddaughter.”
The room tilted.
I had to sit on the edge of the bed to keep from falling. The manager asked if I was okay, but his voice reached me from far away, as if he were speaking from inside a bucket.
My granddaughter.
I read those two words once.
Then again.
Then a third time, hoping they would change.
They didn’t.
My name was Natalie Rios. I never used Morales. My mother, Carmen Rios, always told me that my father had left before I was old enough to remember him. She didn’t speak of him with hatred. She spoke with a closed-off sadness, like someone putting a lid on a pot so it wouldn’t boil over.
“Your father didn’t know how to stay,” she would say.
And I believed her.
Because children believe what they need to in order to sleep at night.
I opened the first envelope with trembling hands.
“My dear Natalie:
If you are reading this, I am already dead. Forgive me for not telling you this to your face. I was not a coward toward you. I was old, I was watched, and I was guilty.
I am Helena Morales. Raul Morales, your father, was my son.”
I felt my heart pounding against my ribs.
Raul.
That name rang a bell.
Not from my childhood.
From an old dream, from a word my mother once said while delirious with fever before she died:
“Raul did want to come back.”
I was twenty then and thought she was raving.
I kept reading.
“Your mother Carmen didn’t steal you. She saved you. When you were born, your father wanted to acknowledge you. My other children opposed it because your existence changed the inheritance. I was a foolish woman then. I believed that blood would never be capable of destroying blood.”
