Chapter 3 - The Archive of Lies
By midnight, the country house was silent. My mother, Mauricio, and Patricia had left hours ago, their luxury SUV roaring down the dark, winding road toward Mexico City after a series of screaming arguments that had ended only when Mikhail had politely but firmly escorted them to their vehicle.
The mobile lab technician had arrived at 10:00 PM. He had taken cheek swabs from Luna, Sol, and me, promising to run the samples against the DNA profile of Mariana’s biological family—records we kept on file for estate trust purposes—within twelve hours.
I sat in Mariana’s study, the only room in the house I had left completely untouched. Her books—mostly poetry, classical literature, and botany guides—still lined the dark oak shelves. Her mahogany desk was dusted with a fine layer of pine pollen.
I pulled open the bottom drawer. It was locked, but I had the key on my personal ring—a key I hadn't used since the day we buried her.
Inside the drawer was a thick, black leather-bound binder. It was Mariana’s medical journal, the one she had kept during her six-month battle with stage-four ovarian cancer. I had never read it. The pain of seeing her handwriting, of reading the day-by-day decline of the woman I loved, had been too much for me to bear.
I opened the binder. The first pages were filled with her neat, elegant script, detailing her hopes, her fears, and her absolute certainty that we would eventually have children.
May 14 The nursery is almost finished. Alejandro bought the tiny yellow crib today. He thinks I don't know he cried when he put it together. He’s going to be such a beautiful father. I can't wait to see him hold our baby.
June 28 The pain started today. A sharp, tearing sensation in my lower abdomen. Dr. Vargas says it’s probably just standard third-trimester pressure, but I can feel something else. Something cold. I haven't told Alejandro yet. He’s already working so hard to finish the hotel project in Cancun.
I flipped forward, my fingers trembling as the dates skipped into the final, dark months of her illness. The writing grew frantic, shaky, the elegant curves of her letters dissolving into desperate, uneven lines.
September 12 They told me the babies had to come out. Twenty-nine weeks. Luna and Sol. They are so small, Alejandro. They are in the incubators at the clinic. I can't even touch them without crying. My mother says we can't tell Alejandro yet. She says his heart is too weak after his father’s death. She says she will handle the medical transfers.
I stopped breathing. The page seemed to spin.
Luna and Sol.
The names were written in her journal. In her own hand. Three years ago.
My mother says we can't tell Alejandro yet.
October 3 Clara came to see me today. She’s the only one I trust. She says my mother and Mauricio are trying to take the trust funds. They told the doctors that Alejandro was out of the country and that the children were to be surrendered to a state-appointed guardian because of 'familial instability.' Clara took them. She ran. She said she would hide them where they could never find them. If you are reading this, Alejandro, please find Clara. Find our girls. They have the silver medals. They have my heart.
I slammed the journal shut, my chest heaving as if I had just been thrown into the freezing waters of the lake.
My own family. My mother. My brother.
They had known. They had known Mariana had given birth to our twin daughters before she died. They had hidden them. They had forced Clara to run, labeling her as unstable, telling me she had fled to Spain, while my daughters were left to rot in some forgotten corner of the state so that the family estate wouldn't be divided.
The phone on the desk began to vibrate. It was a call from the private laboratory in Mexico City.
I picked it up with a numb hand.
"Mr. Rivas?" the technician’s voice was crisp, professional, completely unaware of the bomb he was about to drop into my life. "We have completed the rapid sequencing on the cheek swabs you provided."
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"And?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper.
"The genetic markers are a ninety-nine point nine percent match to the maternal DNA of Mariana Rivas-Vance on file. The children, Luna and Sol, are indeed your biological daughters."
