I arrive at the obvious conclusion. “And she chose Layla.”
“Yes. She died in a plane crash with her husband two years before Layla passed away. I don’t know if your mother tried to find you, but she left instructions with your sister, which are in that letter, for her to look for you in case of her death and to divide the inheritance she received between the two of you. Unfortunately, I have to inform you it wasn’t much. They were practically bankrupt, and what remained, Layla . . .” He sighs. “Anyway, I think it was her way of asking for forgiveness.”
“Buyingmy forgiveness, you mean.”
“Olívia—”
“No, Guillermo. That’s exactly what she did. She tried to soothe her own conscience but was still too much of a coward to take action while she was alive.”
I’m disgusted and strangely relieved I didn’t have to deal with that woman.
I remember my adoptive mother Heloísa. All the times she said she loved me.
“My adoptive mother chose me, you know? She told me there were a lot of orphan babies when I was left there, but she instantly fell in love with me. She was the best mother in the world, Guillermo. She would give the shirt off her back so I could have everything.”
“Who wouldn’t choose you, love?”
I ignore what he says because I’m still not ready to talk about us.
Still, I allow myself to be held in his embrace. My body feels like shivers are continuously running through it.
“How can someone choose between two children, Guillermo? What kind of human being accepts such an imposition from a man?”
“I don’t know, beautiful. All I can say is I can’t imagine giving up a child.”
“Neither can I. Do you see that, in a way, Layla followed the pattern? You said she didn’t want Valentina. She, like the woman who gave birth to her, rejected her own baby.”
Chapter 47
She hasn’t left my arms, but she’s unusually quiet, and that scares me more than if she were arguing with me.
Olívia is intelligent and sensitive. What she said about Layla following her mother’s pattern by rejecting Valentina is something I had already thought of.
I will never admit it out loud, because she’s already had her share of pain in life, but nothing in the world will convince me that her biological mother didn’t need much persuasion to give up one of her daughters. The justification given was that her husband wanted only one child, but maybe she also didn’t want two little girls.
Olívia didn’t read the entire letter, but I did.
I read and reread it, trying to understand, and in the end, the only thing I could gather from it all was that the woman who gave birth to her was as empty as Layla herself.
If Olívia ever finishes reading the letter, she’ll know that what made her mother choose her sister over her was the fact that my late wife had red hair, which was also the hair color of the selfish jerk her mother married.
Can you believe such crap? First, it’s unthinkable to choose between one child or another, and then to base that choice on hair color... They wanted the daughter they were going to raise to look like her stepfather to hush the society gossip.
I hold her even tighter in my arms. I wish to shield her from the pain, but I know it’s impossible, and it wouldn’t be fair either.
Suddenly, I feel choked up and have a need to spill everything. “I never intended to lie to you. I wanted to do the right thing. Allow my daughter to live with her aunt, pass on the money that was rightfully yours and that Layla never delivered. Compensate you in some way for all the injustices you were subjected to. But when I saw your photo, from the very first time I laid eyes on you, my intuition told me they were the ones who’d lost out.”
“Why?”
“Your smile, even through the photograph. I could tell how happy you were.”
“My mother made me promise to live a good life when she was gone. I tried to stay positive.”
I kiss her cheek, although I want so much more. “I love that about you, but there’s nothing wrong with crying sometimes.”
“Finish what you were going to say about when you met me,” she deflects.
“I wasn’t prepared for you, love. In the first twenty minutes I spent in the café, I was knocked head over heels, although I was in denial for a while.”
