The paper slipped from my hands. I don’t know if I screamed. I only remember the dull thud of my knee against the wooden floor and the sound of the folding ladder moving downstairs. “Valentina!” Veronica shouted. No. She couldn’t come up. Not yet. I gathered the pages with clumsy fingers and kept reading through tears so hot the ink blurred.
“Mariana got sick after the delivery, but not with something the doctors knew how to explain. She just started fading. One day she was strong, holding you and singing to you softly, and the next, she couldn’t get up. Your maternal grandmother said it was a punishment for marrying me. Your grandfather said I had broken her heart. Lies. I watched her fight. I watched her kiss you even when her bones ached. I watched her beg them not to take you away from me.”
My mother. Mariana. The woman in the photo. The woman I had buried in my imagination before I ever knew her face. She had lived for six months. She had held me. She had sung to me. And nobody told me.
Downstairs, Veronica was already climbing up. I heard her breathing. The creak of the ladder. “Valentina, come down. Please.” Please. She wasn’t ordering me. She was begging me. That scared me even more. I clutched the letter to my chest and backed away until I hit a box of Christmas decorations.
Veronica appeared through the trapdoor. Her hair was wet, she wore a gray robe, and her face was ghost-white. When she saw the open box, the photos on the floor, and the envelope in my hand, she didn’t pretend to be confused. She didn’t ask what I was doing. She didn’t say it wasn’t what it looked like. She just placed a hand on the attic wood as if she needed to hold herself up. “You found it,” she whispered.
