I had to inspect the new apartment building. The usual: expensive clothes, artificial climate, and rush. But when I got to the gates, everything froze.

The gray dust covered the construction site like a thick mist that barely let anything be seen, but not even all that dirt could hide that silhouette.

“Mr. Roberto?” my driver asked nervously. “Is something wrong?”

I didn’t answer. I pushed the door open and ran out, not caring that my designer shoes got muddy up to the ankle.

There she was. A skinny girl, with a worn-out helmet and a vest that was too big for her on all sides. She was shoveling cement under the sun, soaked in sweat. But when she turned to wipe her face… I felt as if something had been stabbed into my chest.

That look. Those damn green eyes.

It was identical to that of my wife who is no longer here. The same as my little girl Sofia, who got lost in the park two decades ago and who everyone assured me had died.

“You! Hey, you!” I shouted at her with a broken voice.

She dropped the shovel in fright and stepped back, lowering her head.

“Excuse me, boss,” she said trembling. “I swear I wasn’t slacking off, I was just drying myself off. Please don’t fire me, I beg you, I have a seriously ill grandmother.”

I got so close to her that I could smell the fresh cement on her uniform. I took her hands, full of calluses and cuts.

“I’m not going to fire you…” I told her with tears. “Look at me. What’s your name?”

She looked up, bewildered and scared. “My name is Lucía, sir… I’m just a construction worker.”

“No…” I shook my head and brushed the dirty hair off her neck. “If you are who I think you are, you have to have three birthmarks here.”

What I discovered on her neck paralyzed me. But just then, the construction foreman appeared running and shouted something at me that destroyed everything I thought I knew about my daughter’s abduction.

The Foreman Knew Something

The site foreman arrived running, his face red with fury.

“Mr. Mendoza! Get away from that girl right now!”

I looked at him without understanding. I still had Lucía’s hands in mine.

“This worker is trouble,” the foreman continued shouting. “She’s barely been here a week and she’s already causing problems. You can’t go around bothering the investors!”

Lucía pulled away from me with a jerk. She was trembling all over.

“I didn’t do anything wrong, Don Arturo. The gentleman grabbed me.”

I felt rage. A rage I hadn’t felt since the day I lost my Sofia.

“How dare you speak to her like that?” I snapped at the foreman. “This girl hasn’t done anything to you.”

Don Arturo looked at me as if I had gone crazy.

“With all due respect, Mr. Mendoza, you don’t know these people. They are all liars. They come from who knows where, without papers, inventing stories to get pity.”

Something in his tone made me angrier. But it also made me think. Without papers? Where did this girl come from?

I looked at Lucía. She kept her eyes on the ground, but I saw something in her expression. Fear. A deep fear that went beyond losing a job.

“Where do you live?” I asked her gently.

She hesitated. She bit her lip.

“In… in a rented room. In the San Miguel neighborhood.”

“With whom?”

“With my grandmother. I already told you.”

“And your parents?”

Her face tensed. A tear rolled down her dirty cheek.

“I don’t know them, sir. My grandmother says they abandoned me when I was a baby.”

The world stopped for me again. Baby. Abandoned. Grandmother. The pieces were starting to fit together in a horrible way.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-three, I think. My grandmother isn’t very sure.”

Twenty-three. My Sofia would be twenty-three years old if she were still alive.

The foreman huffed impatiently. “Mr. Mendoza, you really shouldn’t waste your time with…”

“Shut up!” I shouted at him. “You’re fired. Get out right now.”

Don Arturo went pale. He opened his mouth to protest, but something in my look stopped him. He left muttering curses.

When we were alone, well, as alone as one can be in the middle of a construction site with fifty workers watching, I knelt in front of Lucía.

She stepped back, frightened.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I told her. “I just need you to listen to me. Twenty years ago, I lost my daughter in a park. Her name was Sofia. She was three years old. She had your same eyes. And she had three moles on her neck, right here.”

I pointed to the spot where I had seen the marks. Lucía instinctively put her hand to her neck.

“Lots of people have moles, sir.”

“Not like those. They formed a perfect triangle. My wife said they were the three stars of Orion’s belt.”

I saw something change in her expression. A flash of recognition.

“My grandmother…” she whispered. “My grandmother always tells me my moles are special. That they are a sign from heaven.”

My heart was beating so fast I thought it was going to explode.

“Can I see them?”

She hesitated for a long moment. Then, slowly, she took off her vest and lowered the collar of her sweaty t-shirt.

There they were. Three moles. Forming a perfect triangle. The stars of Orion.

I collapsed. I fell to my knees in the mud and cried like I hadn’t cried since my wife’s funeral.

“It’s you,” I sobbed. “You’re my little girl. You’re my Sofia.”

Lucía was crying too, but out of confusion.

“I don’t understand anything, sir. I’m not your daughter. My grandmother raised me since I can remember.”

“What is your grandmother’s name?”

“Doña Mercedes. Mercedes Fuentes.”

That name didn’t ring a bell. But that didn’t mean anything. Kidnappers don’t use their real names.

“I need to meet her,” I told her. “I need to talk to her.”

Lucía wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “She’s very sick. She hardly gets out of bed.”

“Then I’ll go to your house. Please. Give me that chance.”

She looked at me with those green eyes, identical to her mother’s, identical to my Sofia’s. And she nodded.

The Journey to the Truth

I told my driver to take us to the San Miguel neighborhood. Lucía was quiet in the back seat. I kept looking at her in the rearview mirror.

Every gesture. Every movement. I looked for traces of my daughter in her. Would she smile the same? Would she have the same mannerisms?

But twenty years is a long time. People change. Children become strangers.

“Are you sure about this, sir?” asked my driver quietly.

“More than anything in my life.”

We arrived in an area that I didn’t even know existed in my city. Unpaved streets. Houses made of sheet metal and wood. Electric cables hanging dangerously. My shiny Mercedes stood out like a diamond in a dumpster.

“It’s here,” Lucía said, pointing to a small house painted faded blue.

We got out. The neighbors looked at us with suspicion and curiosity. Lucía opened the door. It had no lock, just a padlock she removed with a rusty key.

“Grandma,” she called. “I brought a visitor.”

The smell hit me first. Dampness, sickness, poverty. The house had a single room that served as living room, kitchen, and bedroom.

On an old cot, covered with threadbare blankets, lay an elderly woman. She must have been eighty, maybe more. Her skin was wrinkled paper. Her eyes, clouded by cataracts.

But when she saw me enter, those eyes widened with a terror that confirmed all my suspicions.

“Who is it?” she asked with a trembling voice.

“It’s my boss, grandma. The owner of the construction site where I work.”

The old woman tried to sit up, but a violent cough shook her. Lucía ran to help her. I stood at the entrance, observing.

On the walls were photos. Lucía as a child. Lucía as a teenager. Lucía graduating from middle school. But no baby photos. No photos of the early years.

“Doña Mercedes,” I said approaching. “I need to ask you some questions.”

She coughed again. When she took her hand away from her mouth, I saw blood on her fingers.

“I have nothing to tell you.”

“Where did you get Lucía from?”

The silence that followed was deafening. Lucía looked at both of us without understanding.

“What are you talking about? Grandma, what does he mean?”

The old woman closed her eyes. Tears rolled down her sunken cheeks.

“I knew this day would come,” she whispered. “I knew I couldn’t keep the secret forever.”

My heart raced. “What secret?” asked Lucía with a broken voice.

Doña Mercedes opened her eyes and looked at her granddaughter with heartbreaking love.

“Forgive me, my child. Forgive me for everything.”

“What did you do?” asked Lucía stepping back. “Grandma, what did you do?”

The old woman turned to me.

“I didn’t kidnap her,” she said firmly. “I saved her.”

Those words left me frozen.

“You saved her? You stole her from me! You took my daughter away!”

“No!” shouted the old woman with surprising strength. “I found her. I found her crying in the street, dirty, hungry, abandoned. And no one, NO ONE, was looking for her.”

“Lies! We moved heaven and earth! I offered rewards! It was on all the news!”

Doña Mercedes shook her head. “That was later. Much later. When I found her, she had been lost for days. Days. A three-year-old child, alone in the streets, eating out of the garbage.”

I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

“No… it’s not possible.”

“My husband worked at the police station,” continued the old woman. “He told me that if I returned her, they would investigate me. That they would accuse me of kidnapping. That no one would believe me. So I decided… I decided to keep her.”

Lucía was sobbing. “It can’t be true. Tell me it’s not true.”

But deep in my heart, a horrible part of me knew it made sense.

The day I lost Sofia, I was on my cell phone. Closing a deal. Not paying attention to her. My wife was at home, sick. The nanny was new. Young. Irresponsible.

When I realized Sofia was gone, hours had passed. Hours? No. Days. Because first we thought she was with her mother. Then with the nanny. Then with some relative.

Bureaucracy delayed us. Disbelief delayed us. By the time it hit the news, almost a week had passed.

Doña Mercedes was right about one terrible thing. I had lost my daughter long before anyone took her.

The Impossible Decision

I sat on the floor. My legs wouldn’t hold me anymore. Lucía was hugging herself, trembling.

“So… am I Sofia?” she asked with a broken voice.

The old woman nodded.

“You always were, my love. But you were also always my Lucía. I raised you. I gave you everything I could. I loved you like a daughter.”

“You lied to me my whole life!”

“I protected you your whole life,” corrected Doña Mercedes. “Do you think it would have been better to grow up knowing your real parents neglected you so much they lost you?”

Those words pierced me like knives. Because she was right.

I had neglected my daughter. I had been so busy building my empire that I forgot to take care of my family.

When Sofia disappeared, my wife fell into a depression she never came out of. She died two years later. The doctor said it was cardiac arrest. But I knew the truth. She died of sadness. Of guilt. Of a broken heart.

And I kept working. Building buildings. Making money. Trying to fill the void with material things. Until today, when I saw those green eyes in the middle of a construction site.

“What do you want from me?” asked Lucía looking at me. “What do you expect me to do?”

It was a good question. What did I expect? That she would leave everything and come live in my mansion? That she would forget the twenty years of life she had built? That she would call a stranger millionaire “dad”?

“I don’t know,” I admitted honestly. “I only know that I spent twenty years dying inside. Twenty years wondering what became of you. If you suffered. If you were hurt. If you thought of me.”

“I never thought of you,” said Lucía harshly. “Because I never knew you existed.”

Her words hurt more than any physical blow. But they were fair.

Doña Mercedes coughed again. This time more violently. Blood stained the blankets.

“Grandma,” shouted Lucía running towards her.

I approached too. “She needs a hospital,” I said. “Now.”

“There is no money for hospitals,” murmured the old woman.

“I’ll take care of everything. I’ll call my personal doctor.”

“I don’t want your charity,” said Doña Mercedes with pride.

“It’s not charity. It’s the least I can do for the woman who took care of my daughter when I couldn’t.”

The old woman looked at me surprised. Lucía too.

I took out my cell phone and called my doctor. I explained the situation. In less than thirty minutes, a private ambulance arrived at the San Miguel neighborhood.

The neighbors came out to watch the spectacle. The paramedics put Doña Mercedes on a stretcher.

“Lucía,” said the old woman grabbing her granddaughter’s hand. “Whatever happens, remember that I loved you. That everything I did was for love.”

“I know, grandma. I know.”

The ambulance took her away. I told Lucía we would follow in my car. During the ride to the hospital, neither of us spoke.

There was too much to say and no way to say it.