—Give us the microphone back, Jimena.
“No, sister. People deserve to know the truth.” Her lips were trembling, but she kept smiling. “Fernando and I love each other. We're going to start a family. Something you could never give him.”
A faint “uuuh” escaped the room. I felt like three hundred eyes were on me.
“A family,” I repeated.
“Accept it. You lost.” And she raised her voice so everyone could hear: “This time I won.”
I didn't answer him. I turned to the back table and nodded to the man in the gray suit.
Hector stood up. He was carrying a thick red folder under his arm. He walked forward without greeting anyone, without smiling.
Jimena's smile began to fade.
“Who is it?” she asked.
I snatched the microphone from his hands. He refused to let go.
—The man who's been hiding something for four months, something you don't even know about.
Hector placed the red folder on the cake table. He opened it, took out a plain sheet of paper with the lab's logo printed on it, and handed it to me without saying a word.
I held it up so my sister could see it clearly.
—Sister—I said firmly—this child isn't Fernando's.
His face paled.
—And the real father is sitting here, in this room. Three tables away from you:
Part 2.
—Three tables away from yours—I repeated. His name is Ricardo. He's a colleague of yours. The one you brought as a guest.
The room suddenly changed. A dark-haired man stood up abruptly and knocked over his chair. He didn't run away. He stood there, pale, staring intently at Jimena. And Jimena saw it. It was all written in his eyes.
Fernando sank into an armchair, his face in his hands. Ten years of marriage, and in the end, not even the child they ruined my life for wasn't his.
I won. That's what I thought that night. I won.
But I came home and couldn't sleep.
Because something was holding me back. Jimena smiled at me for ten years, while I slept with my husband. Ten years of "I love you, sister," right before my eyes.
What if she'd lied to me about this for ten years...
What else had she lied to me about?
That morning, I took a Bimbo bag from the bottom drawer.
Inside was a small blue wool hat. I'd knitted it myself twelve years earlier, when I was seven months pregnant.
Because I had a son. No one in this story knew.
Twelve years ago, I hadn't met Fernando yet. I was in the army, and my baby's father, a soldier, had died in an accident three months before his birth.
I gave birth alone. In a small clinic, at night. I lost a lot of blood, I lost consciousness. When I woke up, the only thing beside my bed was Jimena, holding my hand.
"She's gone, Sofi," she told me. "She didn't even have time to breathe."
I never saw him again. Not even after his death. "So that image won't remain etched in your memory," she said, and took care of everything. No wake. No grave. Just her word.
I believed her because she was my sister and because I was too distraught to ask her the question.
For twelve years I kept this little hat without even having a grave to mourn it over.
That night, for the first time, I didn't hug him. I just stared at him. And I wondered why, in twelve years, I had never been allowed to see my son.
I didn't tell anyone. They would have thought I was crazy. They would have said that the scandal of that night wasn't enough, that now I was digging up bodies.
But I remembered something.
Diego, Jimena's "son," was born that same week, right when she was due. Twelve years later, Diego has my father's eyes and the same birthmark on his chin as me.
One afternoon, I went to my parents' house, where Diego spends weekends. I took his toothbrush from the bathroom. There were hairs on it. I put it in a small bag.
In the lab, my hands were shaking. The woman asked me questions about our relationship. I didn't know what to say. I simply said, "Out of curiosity."
Three weeks without sleep, waiting for an envelope.
When it arrived, I opened it standing in the kitchen. I read a single line: "Probability of pregnancy: 99.99%."
I sat down on the floor. There, on the kitchen floor, newspaper in hand.
My son isn't dead.
For twelve years, my son sat three chairs away from me at every meal. And he called me "Auntie."
I arrived early the next day. Diego was there.
