The Garza mansion was so quiet you could hear the ticking of the clock in the hallway. Valentina mopped the office furniture with the concentration of someone trying to become invisible. She’d only been working there for three weeks and still felt that any out-of-place noise could get her fired.
She stopped in front of the fireplace to clean a photograph frame. She did it almost without looking… until her eyes met those of the child in the picture.
The mop slipped from her hands.
“Sir…” she whispered, her voice breaking. “This boy lived with me at the orphanage…”
The sound of the mug hitting the floor made her jump. Mateo, the owner of the mansion, spun around so fast he almost knocked over his chair.
“What did you say?”
Valentina swallowed. Her hands trembled, but she didn’t move away from the frame.
“This boy here…” she said, pointing at the photograph. He lived with me at the Santa Clara orphanage. We slept in the same dormitory. His name was Daniel.
Mateo’s face paled.
Daniel.
That name, buried for almost thirty years. The name of his twin brother, the boy he saw disappear in front of the dam when they were four. The boy everyone assured him had drowned.
“That’s not possible,” he murmured. “My brother died a long time ago.”
“I don’t know about any deaths, sir,” Valentina replied firmly. “I only know that that boy lived in the orphanage until he was sixteen. He was my best friend. He protected me when the others made fun of ‘the skinny orphan girl.’ I’ll never forget his face.”
Mateo crossed the office in three steps. He picked up the photo with trembling hands. The boy was smiling, his expression slightly crooked to the left, his dark, deep eyes the same ones he saw every morning in the mirror.
“Daniel always talked about you,” Valentina continued, unable to stop the memories. “He said he had a twin brother, that they lived in a big house, that his dad was a chef and called him ‘champion.’ He drew that house over and over in a little notebook. A piano, two children holding hands, a man in a chef’s hat…”
Mateo closed his eyes. His father had been a chef. His mother played the piano. And he had called Daniel “champion” ever since he learned to talk.
Before he could say anything, soft footsteps coming down the stairs broke the silence.
“Dad…” Sofia, his seven-year-old daughter, poked her head through the door, clutching the teddy bear she’d carried since the accident. “Is something wrong?”
“Nothing, princess,” Mateo lied. “Go up to your room.”
Sofia stared at Valentina, as if she could immediately see the fear in her eyes. The employee gave her a gentle smile.
“Everything’s fine, Sofi. We just talked about boring grown-up things.”
The girl nodded, a little calmer, and went back upstairs, though before disappearing she turned around to make sure Valentina was still there.
When they were alone, Mateo’s legs gave way beneath him. He slumped into the armchair.
“Tell me everything you remember about Daniel,” he asked. “Everything.”
Valentina took a breath. Talking about her friend was like reopening a wound that had never healed, but it was also honoring the promise they had made one day in the darkness of that dormitory with bunk beds.
She told him about the crescent-shaped birthmark behind his left ear, how he wrote and drew with both hands, how he would put himself between her and the older boys’ beatings, the night when, at sixteen, tired of waiting, he ran away to “look for my brother on his own.”
“I searched for him for years,” she whispered finally. “I went to hospitals, police stations, shelters… it was like he’d vanished off the face of the earth. I thought he was dead. And today I see his picture in his family’s house.”
Mateo ran his hands over his face. The guilt, which had haunted him his whole life like a silent shadow, suddenly became unbearable.
If Daniel had been alive all that time… then someone had lied. And he, a frightened child, then a broken teenager, and then a busy adult, had never dared to question that lie too much.
However, in the pained glint of Valentina’s eyes, there was something else: the same loneliness he had seen in Sofía’s eyes since his wife’s death.
Because before Daniel, before Valentina, before any hope, the entire house had lived in silence for a year.
From that day on, life in the mansion changed without anyone planning it.
Mateo hired a private investigator, rummaged through boxes of mementos that smelled of dust and the past, and every afternoon he sat with Valentina in the office, surrounded by yellowed photographs. He told her about the day of the disappearance at the dam; she recounted Daniel’s years in the orphanage. Together they tried to piece together a puzzle that someone had deliberately dismantled almost three decades ago.
Meanwhile, upstairs, something was also changing.
Sofía, who had barely spoken since her mother’s death.
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