The news hit like a slap in the face. It was one thing to suspect something, to consider a possibility. It was something else to receive confirmation that there were, indeed, real blood relatives. My father had betrayed me and my mother. He’d raised two daughters, whom he probably loved more than me, while I’d waited for him to return to Spain for over two decades. But he was never planning to come back, I now realized. He’d made a new life without us, discarding us like an old newspaper. What an idiot I’d been—religiously writing all those letters to him, sitting for hours by the window, drawing his portrait. In my childhood innocence, I’d always expected him to walk through the front door, his arms filled with presents, and then take me on one of his adventures.

“Angélica is the eldest,” he said. “Well, in reality, there is a brother, too. But he renounced his inheritance.”

A brother as well. And he renounced the fortune?

“He’s a priest.” Aquilino stared at his cigar with appreciation. “He took the vow of poverty.”

A priest, of all things. My father hadn’t been a religious man, not according to my mother’s recollections. Then how did he produce a priest? I, myself, was filled with doubts. Although I would never voice them out loud. But if it was true that this brother had renounced my father’s money, had it been a voluntary vow or a forced one?

“What about their mother? Is she also an heir?”

“No, Doña Gloria Alvarez passed away a few years ago. But we’ll get into all the details tomorrow.”

My father had hidden so many things from us. It stung worse than his death. Good thing my mother hadn’t lived to see so much deceit. Another woman, another family. Did he think he could make amends by leaving me a portion of his estate? What good would that do when I never had him? I would never know what his voice sounded like, what cologne he used, or feel the warmth of his hugs.

A thump against the window startled us both. We moved toward the pane in time to see a speckled bird wrecked on the pebbles outside the house.

“A sparrow-hawk,” Aquilino said.

I remained silent, unable to keep my eyes from the dying bird.

“The poor creature must not have seen the glass,” he went on. “It didn’t know what it was getting itself into when it came here.”

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2

Two weeks earlier