They Said I Was Adopted, but I Was Always the Real Daughter novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Bear Day

Paulina lives on the fourteenth floor of a glass tower near the river.

I took the elevator up alone, with the register copy in my coat and my mask over my mouth.

Gael waited in the van downstairs.

I'd told him that if I wasn't back in an hour, he could come and carry me out.

She opened the door in a gray sweatshirt with her hair up, and her eyes were puffy.

She looked at the mask, at my bald head under the cap, and at the folded paper in my hand.

"You went," she said.

"I went."

"I asked you not to."

"I know what you asked."

I walked past her into the living room and put the registry copy on her glass coffee table.

I laid the bracelet beside it, and the photograph of my mother on the patio.

Paulina stared at them.

She was still wearing her little gold bracelet, the one she'd had since she was a girl.

"Say something," I said.

"Inés, it's a clerical error."

"Don't."

"It's a late registration. Lots of families do it. It means nothing."

"Paulina."

"It was a home birth, and there was no time to get to a..."

"Paulina, I'm bald. I have leukemia. I've been sleeping in a hospital chair with a stuffed bear. I don't have the energy to listen to you lie to me. Please don't."

She stopped.

Her face did something I'd never seen it do.

All the careful brightness went out of it at once, and underneath was a seven-year-old girl.

She sat down on the arm of the sofa.

"The teddy bear," she said. "Do you remember what we were fighting about?"

"Which of us got to hold it."

"No." She wiped her face. "That morning at the table, our cousin told me I wasn't a real Cárdenas. He said it into his cereal. He said my real mother was dead and Mom had taken me, because that was what his mother told him. I didn't know what it meant. I only knew it was true, because it felt true."

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