—I always knew you weren’t related to me by blood. And never, not for a single day, was it hard for me to love you.
That phrase destroyed me more than any DNA test.
I wanted to hate them. I really did. But while my mother wept in front of me and my father stood firm as an old wall, I understood something unbearable: yes, they lied to me… but they lied to me while loving me.
I went to a guesthouse in the next town for a few weeks. There, I received a folder sent by Celia: the annulment proceedings had already begun, along with evidence, documents, and a handwritten letter. She didn’t apologize. She didn’t justify herself. She only said that she had arrived late, in the wrong place, and in the worst possible way to a motherhood that had been buried for twenty years.
