As Valentina dried one of the babies, she noticed something the chaos of the forest had hidden. A small plastic bracelet on the baby’s wrist, the kind hospitals use. She held it up to the light.
“Santiago, look at this,” she said, her voice trembling.
He stepped closer. The bracelet clearly read: “Baby Girl Moralis.”
“The certificate Ricardo left me said ‘Morales,’ my last name,” Valentina said, feeling a chill that had nothing to do with the cold. “But this says ‘Moralis.’ It’s an ‘i,’ not an ‘e.’”
Their eyes met. If the last name was misspelled or different, then the certificate was fake. And if the certificate was fake, Ricardo’s entire story was an elaborate lie.
“Who is Ricardo really?” Santiago asked, immediately opening his laptop. His fingers flew over the keyboard, accessing databases an ordinary citizen wouldn’t know how to use. Minutes later, his face went pale.
“Valentina… Ricardo Mendoza doesn’t exist. The documents he used for the wedding are fake. His face matches that of Roberto Méndez, a man wanted for fraud and…” Santiago paused, looking at her with concern, “…human trafficking.”
Valentina’s world stopped. She had almost married a criminal. And those babies weren’t a farewell “gift”; they were stolen merchandise he had been forced to abandon when something went wrong.
At that exact moment, Valentina’s phone—rescued from her purse—started ringing. It was an unknown number. Santiago signaled her to answer and put it on speaker.
“Hello?” she said, her voice shaking.
“You have something that doesn’t belong to you, sweetheart,” a hoarse, threatening male voice filled the room. “And I’m not talking about Ricardo. Return them if you want to keep breathing. We know where you are.”
