“I don’t know this woman,” Ricardo said, trying to keep his voice firm as he approached. “Come here, girls. Now.”
“But Papá, she has the same eyes as Mamá,” said Valentina Isabel, gently touching the old woman’s face. “And she smells like that perfume you keep in your closet.”
Ricardo froze.
How could Valentina speak of eyes when she had never seen?
And how could she know about Carmen’s perfume—the one belonging to his late wife, kept in a locked drawer in his bedroom?
“My dear boy,” said the old woman, her voice raspy with age yet warm, “your daughters have the same golden hair as my Carmen. And the same blue eyes.”
Ricardo felt the world tilt.
Carmen was the name of his wife—the woman he had lost three years earlier due to complications during childbirth.
But how did this beggar know such intimate details?
“Who are you?” Ricardo demanded, keeping his distance though he could not hide the tremor in his voice.
“Papá, look,” said Camila Fernanda, pointing upward. “The clouds are making a heart.”
He instinctively glanced at the sky—and indeed, a heart-shaped cloud formation floated above.
But what stunned him was that Camila pointed exactly in the right direction.
Marisol approached hesitantly.
“Señor Ricardo… how could they…?”
Ricardo silenced her with a sharp gesture.
“Take the girls to the car,” he ordered, though his voice faltered.
“We don’t want to go, Papá,” said Sofía. “Grandma Carmen said she’ll tell us about Mamá.”
A chill ran up Ricardo’s spine.
Something impossibly strange was unfolding.
His daughters—who relied on canes and struggled even to walk around their own home—had run confidently through a crowded plaza… and once they were pulled away from the beggar woman, they reverted to groping blindly with their hands.
Back home, they would not stop talking about Grandma Carmen.
They described her clothing, her smile, even the colors of flowers around them.
“How do you know these things?” Ricardo asked through the rearview mirror.
“We saw them, Papá,” said Sofía simply.
“You can’t see,” Ricardo insisted, trying to remain calm.
“Near Grandma Carmen… yes we can,” explained Camila. “She showed us how to open our eyes for real.”
Ricardo drove home in uneasy silence.
That night, unable to sleep, he held a wedding photo of Carmen—radiant in her white dress, smiling with the gentle warmth that had once changed his life. Memories flooded back: he had met her during a science fair his company sponsored; she had been a preschool teacher; they fell in love quickly—deeply.
A soft noise interrupted his thoughts.
He walked to the girls’ bedroom and found them sitting upright on the bed.
“What’s happening?” he whispered.
“Grandma Carmen is singing to us,” said Sofía.
Ricardo scanned the empty room. “Where is she singing?”
“In our heads,” explained Valentina. “The same way Mamá used to sing when we were in her tummy.”
Ricardo felt a shock.
The girls should not have known that Carmen used to sing to them during pregnancy.
“What song is it?” he asked.
All three began humming a lullaby he didn’t recognize—sweet and melancholic.
“Where did you learn this?”
“Grandma Carmen taught us,” said Camila. “She said Mamá sang it when she was little.”
The next day, determined to uncover the truth, Ricardo returned to the plaza.
The woman was gone.
He asked vendors about her.
“She comes around three in the afternoon,” said a coconut seller. “Been here maybe two years. Good lady. Kids like her. She has a way with them.”
When she finally reappeared, sitting calmly as if waiting for him, Ricardo approached.
“You came back,” she said softly.
“Who are you?” Ricardo pressed. “And how do you know my daughters?”
“Sit with me,” she said, patting the concrete beside her. “I won’t harm you.”
He hesitated—but sat.
“My name is Carmen Ruiz,” she began, “and Carmen—the mother of your daughters—was my daughter.”
Ricardo felt as if the air had been punched from his lungs.
“That’s impossible,” he said. “My wife was an orphan.”
“She believed that. It wasn’t true,” the woman answered gently.
And so, piece by piece, she revealed the unthinkable:
She had been forced to give Carmen up for adoption at seventeen.
She had spent decades searching for her.
She had been tricked by Veronica—Ricardo’s sister-in-law—into believing Carmen had died.
Then she showed Ricardo photos.
Documents.
Letters.
The baby in the pictures had the exact same face as Ricardo’s daughters.
He could no longer deny it.
This woman truly was Carmen’s mother.
And then came the revelation that shook him to the core:
“Your daughters are not blind,” she said. “Not truly.”
“How can you know that?”
