The canvas beneath was breathtaking, masterful brushstrokes and luminous color, but what froze me was not the artistry—it was the woman staring at me from another life.
Young, radiant, dark hair tumbling over her shoulders, honey-colored eyes alight with happiness; she looked twenty-five, glowing with a joy I rarely saw in her real life.
“Mom,” I whispered, barely breathing, because the woman in the gold frame was Carolina Vega, the maid, the widow, the professor, the person I loved most in the world.
What was her portrait doing here, painted like royalty inside the mansion of Mexico’s richest man, hidden behind linen and silence like a shameful, sacred secret?
“WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?”
The roaring voice shook the shelves. I jolted, the ladder swayed, my heart slammed against my ribs; I turned and saw Augusto Ferraz standing there, furious.
His jacket was off, sleeves rolled, his usually controlled face burning with rage; then his eyes lifted toward the painting and everything inside him seemed to shatter.
The anger vanished instantly, replaced by raw pain; he staggered closer, staring at the portrait, then at me, then back again, as if counting impossible similarities.
I climbed down, legs trembling, preparing to apologize, to beg, to run; my excuses about the wind spilled uselessly while he stared like a man seeing ghosts.
He stepped toward me, unsteady, smelling of expensive cologne and tobacco, not alcohol, and asked in a broken whisper if I knew the woman in the painting.
I lifted my chin, clinging to the pride my mother taught me, and told him simply that the woman in the portrait was my mother, Carolina Vega.
The color drained from his face; he clutched his chest, leaned on the desk, muttering “impossible” and my mother’s name like a prayer and a curse combined.
His gaze searched my features—eyes, nose, jawline—and I watched realization slam into him; he whispered that I had her eyes and, terrifyingly, something of his own gaze.
A single tear slid down the steel king’s cheek. Carmela burst in, froze at the uncovered painting, then fled when he ordered everyone out and canceled every meeting.
We were left alone in the heavy silence of the library, haunted by the portrait, the fallen sheet, and a truth neither of us had been ready to meet.
Part II – Blood and Silence
Augusto poured cognac with trembling hands, amber spilling on polished wood; he asked me to sit, his voice no longer thunderous but hollow, like something caved in.
I sat on the leather sofa, clutching the glass more as an anchor than a drink; the smell of alcohol curled through the familiar scent of wax and paper.
He said my mother had vanished decades ago, that he’d spent thirty years speaking to the painting, begging forgiveness from a canvas, never imagining her daughter cleaned his floors.
I told him she died five years earlier from leukemia, slowly and painfully, and that we faced it alone in a public hospital where fluorescent lights hummed like insects.
His face twisted with grief; he confessed he had once believed she’d gone abroad, building a better life, and clung to that convenient lie to ease his guilt.
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