Chapter 6 - The Unraveling Secret
“Why did you never tell me?”
The words hung in the air, sharp and unyielding.
Marisol felt the last remaining drop of blood drain entirely from her face. Her knees wobbled under her weight, and for a terrifying second, she thought she might collapse onto the marble floor.
“Tell you what, sir?” she whispered, her voice cracking pathetically, betraying every lie she had tried to construct to protect herself.
Diego didn't blink. He ignored her deflection entirely, closing the distance between them until he was standing just feet away. His dark eyes shifted downward, locking once more onto the little girl holding the golden button.
“Don’t call me ‘sir,’ Marisol,” Diego said, his voice dropping into a raw, gravelly tone that sent a shiver straight down her spine. “We stopped being strangers a long time ago.”
Marisol closed her eyes tightly, tears finally spilling over her lashes, hot and bitter against her cheeks.
Diego crouched down slightly, leveling his gaze with Valentina’s face. He looked at the shape of her eyes, the gentle curve of her cheekbones, the stubborn tilt of her chin—features that he had looked at in the mirror every single morning of his life, mirrored back at him in miniature.
“Why is she my daughter?” Diego asked, not with anger, but with an overwhelming, crushing weight of realization.
The dam inside Marisol finally broke. All the years of loneliness, of hiding in the shadows, of working herself to the bone while raising his child in secret, boiled over into a fierce, protective fury.
“Your daughter?!” Marisol choked out, her voice rising, shaking with the ghosts of the past. “You have the audacity to ask me that after what you did?! After you vanished into thin air without a single word, leaving me alone in a city where I knew nobody, pregnant and terrified?!”
Diego stepped back as if he had been physically struck. “What are you talking about? I never vanished from you—I searched for you for months after that summer!”
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“Don’t lie to me!” Marisol sobbed, clutching Valentina closer. “I went to your apartment! Your phone number was disconnected! Your friends told me you had moved on to Europe to take over the family enterprise and didn't want any distractions from your old life!”
Silence settled over them, heavy and suffocating, as two entirely different versions of a shattered past collided in the grand hallway.
