Chapter 21: Enough

Brenda stood at the front of the stage with the microphone in both hands.

She was twenty-seven and pregnant and wearing a cream dress, and her knees were shaking so hard the hem moved.

"My name is Brenda Quiroz," she said. "For two months this hospital and half this city thought I was Rodrigo Escalante's wife."

"I am not. I never was."

Aurora started toward her, and two waiters stepped smoothly in her way.

"I was told Valeria Ocampo agreed to all of it," Brenda said. "I was shown a letter with her signature. I believed it, because I wanted to."

"That letter is forged. You saw it on the screens."

"I was told the baby was Rodrigo's. Doña Aurora signed the transfer papers herself, in her own hand, at my father's clinic."

"Rodrigo told me weeks ago it was a donor, a stranger, that she paid for. I kept quiet until tonight."

Her voice broke, and she waited, and nobody in the ballroom helped her.

"I don't know whose child this is," she said. "I know it's mine. I will raise it, and I will not give it a name that isn't true."

"Mija," said a woman's voice from the back, and Brenda's mother stood up in a blue dress and began to cry.

Brenda lowered the microphone.

The applause started with one man at the far wall and moved forward table by table.

Aurora turned in a slow circle, and nobody met her eyes.

Then she did the thing Valeria had known she would do.

She looked for her son.

"Rodrigo," she said, and her voice was a stranger's, small and cracked. "Tell them to stop. These people are lying. They're hurting your mother."

Rodrigo stood next to her, with his hands at his sides.

He had not said a word since the toast began.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Sterile? I Had Children with the Magnate from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.