“Yeah, but what else do you see?”
“That’s the vestibule at the Royal Conservatory, and she looks young, so I guess she was still studying there.”
Impatiently, I took the photo from him and held it next to my cheek. “Look closely at the guy next to her.” Then I pulled back my hair and pointed at my face. “Notice anything?”
Matías brought his face close to the photo and shook his head.
“No way!”
Nervously, I asked, “I’m not making it up, right? There’s a major resemblance there.”
“You’re like the same person.”
I felt weak in the knees and had to lean against the wall. “She always told me I was a slipup, that she’d hooked up with a stranger, that she knew nothing about him and he was impossible to get in touch with. But that’s not what the pictures say. Plus they were hidden. If that box hadn’t broken…”
Matías shook his head and leaned next to me. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Not having a dad never really mattered to me that much, especially one who didn’t know I existed. But now… I don’t know. What if he’s out there? What if he does know about me? Where is he?”
“You need to confront your mother and make her tell you the truth.”
“It’s been twenty-two years. Don’t you think she would have told me if she’d wanted to? And why should I trust her, right? If the man in the pictures is who I think he is, then she’s gone out of her way to make sure I don’t know about him.”
“So?”
“I don’t know, Matías. I’m freaking out right now. I don’t know what I feel—if I even want to know who he is, if I want to meet him… Maybe it’s just a coincidence that we look alike and I’m overthinking it.” I shook my head, unable to clear my thoughts, feeling lost in all that uncertainty.
“Listen, if I had a daughter wandering the world, I’d want to know,” Matías said.
“What if he does know?”
“Even if he does, the question is whatyouneed. You don’t have to respect his decisions when they affect you like this.”
I closed my eyes and thought about what he said, trying to silence the voices in my head that came from the more rational part of myself. The part that was debating between what was the right thing to doand what was the easy thing to do. The part that was scared to suffer and that preferred to ignore the truth. The part that thought of others before myself.
Matías was right. I wasn’t just born from nothing. I had a father and a mother and no relationship with either of them. They had made that choice for me. But what about what I wanted? Why should I just accept things as they were when they affected my life?
The words emerged on their own, pushed by anxieties I didn’t know I had before then. “I need to know who my father is. I need to meet him. I need to know his name, his age, where he lives, what he does for a living. If he has a family. What his voice sounds like, what he smells like. I need to know if he ever thinks of me.”
“Then do it, Maya. Go look for him.”
I nodded, more and more convinced that this was something I had to do.
“I will.”
11
There’s always a first step. One that puts us on a certain path and shapes everything that will happen afterward. It’s like a compass pointing us in a certain direction. Finding those photos was the first step on a journey whose destination I still don’t know today. That’s what life is like: random, unpredictable, impossible to plan. And you just have to keep living it until the day you die. The end—that’s the only real destination.
When that moment comes, the moment when everything changes and your path turns in a different direction, you know it. You feel it. Maybe you just feel a slight tickle. The air grows thinner. You can’t concentrate, you get a feeling in your chest, you keep needing to look over your shoulder.
Still—you know it.
And I knew it that next morning, after a sleepless night.
I got up early and went to the Royal Dance Conservatory. I was absolutely certain that my mother wouldn’t give me any answers if I had nothing to base my questions on. And that meant I needed a lot more than a photo of someone who looked like me.
I knew Fyodora was still giving classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays from nine to eleven, and that she liked to arrive early. I waited forher at the door. I felt like a bundle of nerves. When she arrived, I ran over to meet her.
