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Valeria was the last one.
—Me too.
Ricardo agreed.
The three of them gathered their things. Nigupa approached him. Nigupa hugged him. Nigupa promised nothing.
But they didn’t leave like complete strangers either.
Before leaving, Maria turned around.
—If one day my daughter or son asks me who you were… I still don’t know what I’m going to answer.
Ricardo swallowed hard.
—Tell them the truth when you can.
“Which one?” she asked.
Ricardo looked at her for a long time.
—The one I can reach first.
When the door closed behind them, the house regained its silence, although it was no longer the same old silence as before. Now it was filled with future voices, with possible worries, with questions that one day would come with eyes like their own.
Ricardo slumped down onto the chair.
The open envelope still lay on the table.
Inside, among the reports, peeked out a copy of the letter written years before by Claudia.
She took it with trembling hands.
Only the line underlined by her:
Sometimes biological truth doesn’t break up a family. It only reveals that it was always stranger than we imagined.
Ricardo rested the sheet against his chest and closed his eyes.
For the first time since his return from Europe, he thought about ridicule, about scandal, about what his friends from the retirement club would say.
It weighed three small beats.
Eп three lives qυe veпíaп eп camiпo.
And he, somehow impossible, at seventy years old was about to meet not only three children… but also the brother he had carried inside him all his life without knowing it.