Not uncommon in itself.
But the supporting affidavit attached to the amendment is missing.
Not lost in fire, not damaged by flood, not archived elsewhere.
Missing.
Lucía’s mouth hardens in that precise way it does right before she decides somebody deserves trouble.
“We go deeper,” she says.
Deeper means the private clinic.
Clínica Santa Isabel closed eleven years ago after a tax scandal and was converted into luxury offices. Records were supposedly transferred to municipal storage. Supposedly. Between supposed and actual is where entire lives disappear.
Lucía gets a court-access request in motion under suspected identity fraud.
You go to work the next morning because your patients are still sick whether your life is real or not. But now the hospital feels altered. The fluorescent lights buzz differently. Residents speak and your attention lags a beat behind. The old woman, María, is already there when you pull into the staff entrance.
She’s sweeping leaves away from the curb.
You stop the car and just watch.
No performance. No plea. No rushing toward you like a claimant scenting victory. She works the way she always does, with patient, almost reverent concentration, as though keeping the entrance clean is the only offering she is allowed to make to the possibility of your existence.
It makes you angrier than if she had begged.
At lunch, you go down.
She sees you and straightens too quickly, one hand flying to smooth her apron.
“I only have ten minutes,” you say.
She nods. “Ten minutes is a lot.”
You almost tell her not to say things like that. Instead you sit beside her on the bench.
“Tell me exactly what happened,” you say. “From the beginning.”
She does.
And this time she gives you names.
The man who got her pregnant: Álvaro Santillán, married, from a family with money in tequila distribution and private clinics. The aunt who arranged for María to be taken to a discreet maternity home outside the city. The nun who pressured her to sign “burial papers.” The hospital orderly who later whispered that the baby had not died, only “gone where she would be better off.” The retired nurse who recognized María decades later and finally told her that a dark-haired infant girl had been transferred through Santa Isabel under the name Baby Ruiz before becoming, somehow, Baby Lozano.
