Chapter 2 - The Ghost of St. Jude's
The silence inside the mahogany study became so heavy that the ticking of the grandfather clock sounded like a hammer strike.
Carmen stood frozen in the doorway, her manicured hands trembling against the polished wood.
Behind her, Hector gripped his walking cane so tightly that his knuckles turned stark white.
“Mauricio, give that envelope to me right now,” my father demanded, trying to sound authoritative.
His voice lacked its usual commanding resonance; it sounded hollow, dry, and frayed at the edges.
“You are not reading another man's business under my roof,” Hector added, taking a shuffling step forward.
I did not answer him.
Instead, I set Renata down gently on the soft leather sofa near the bookshelves.
“Stay right here, sweetheart,” I said, unbuttoning my cashmere overcoat and draping it over her wet shoulders.
She pulled the coat tightly around herself, her large hazel eyes darting nervously between my parents.
I turned back to the mahogany desk, placed my hand on the thick packet, and pulled out the contents.
Carmen let out a ragged gasp, lunging forward to grab my wrist.
“Mauricio, no! You don't know what you're destroying!” she cried out.
I caught her arm in mid-air, holding her back with an iron grip.
“Do not touch me,” I said, my voice dangerously low.
I pushed her back gently but firmly, stepped inside the room, and slammed the heavy oak door shut.
I turned the brass deadbolt with a loud, mechanical click.
Outside, Hector began hammering against the thick wood with the head of his cane.
“Open this door, Mauricio!” he roared from the hallway.
“You have no right to pry into confidential family matters!”
I ignored the banging, took a deep breath, and flipped on the brass desk lamp.
The top document bore the formal gold-embossed letterhead of Vance & Sterling LLP, Attorneys at Law.
Beneath the letterhead was a certified declaration of genetic analysis issued by the State Department of Health.
My eyes scanned the first few lines, trying to make sense of the dense legal terminology.
The words blurred for a second before snapping into horrifying clarity.
Subject A: Mauricio Salvatore DeLuca.
Subject B: Renata Jane Doe (Registration ID: NY-88421).
Relationship Probability: Paternal Parentage Confirmed at 99.98%.
The air vanished from my lungs in an instant.
My hands shook so violently that the thick paper rustled in the quiet room.
Paternal parentage.
Ninety-nine point ninety-eight percent.
I stared at the black ink, reading the numbers over and over until my vision burned.
I was not Renata's adoptive father.
I was her biological father.
A wave of dizziness hit me so hard that I had to plant both hands on the edge of the mahogany desk to keep from falling.
Seven years ago, my life had been split into pieces.
I had been deeply, passionately in love with a young botanical illustrator named Elena Rivera.
Elena was everything my family despised: humble, gentle, fiercely independent, and completely uninterested in DeLuca money.
My mother had treated Elena like poison from the moment I brought her to this house.
Carmen had offered Elena a check for two hundred thousand dollars to terminate our relationship and leave the state.
Elena had torn the check in half and thrown the pieces into Carmen's face.
When Elena discovered she was pregnant, we planned to elope and leave the family empire behind forever.
Then came the trip to Singapore.
Hector had insisted that I oversee a massive shipping logistics merger overseas, claiming my presence was mandatory to save the family business.
While I was twelve thousand miles away in Asia, the call came from my mother.
Carmen had been sobbing hysterically on the international line.
She told me that Elena had been driving on Highway 9 during a torrential rainstorm.
She said Elena’s car had skidded off an embankment into the river, killing both her and our unborn child instantly.
When I returned to the country, there was no body to view; Carmen claimed the burial had been closed-casket due to the severity of the crash.
Dr. Raymond Ward, our longtime family physician, had signed the death certificates and handed me the official mortuary documents.
I had fallen into a black hole of grief that lasted for nearly three years.
I buried myself in work, sleeping four hours a night, trying to drown out the memory of Elena’s laugh.
Then, four years ago, a private charity adoption agency in upstate New York contacted my office.
They claimed a two-year-old orphan had been surrendered to their ward, and an anonymous benefactor had paid for her early care.
The moment I walked into that nursery and saw Renata sitting on the floor with her hazel eyes, my heart stopped.
Her eyes were the exact color of Elena’s eyes.
I adopted her within forty-eight hours, believing that the universe was giving me a second chance to love someone.
I thought it was a miracle of fate.
Now, the paper in my hands told a story of unspeakable monstrous evil.
Beneath the DNA profile was an unsealed affidavit signed under penalty of perjury by Dr. Raymond Ward himself.
The affidavit was dated five days ago, stamped with a notary seal from a hospice facility in Boston.
Dr. Ward had terminal stage-four cancer.
Facing death, the old doctor had finally chosen to confess his crimes to Marcus Vance, the managing partner of the law firm.
I read the lines of Ward's confession, my chest tightening until I could barely draw breath.
Elena Rivera had not died on Highway 9 seven years ago.
The car accident had indeed occurred, but Elena was pulled from the wreckage alive and rushed to St. Jude’s Memorial Hospital.
She gave birth to a healthy, six-pound baby girl via emergency surgery.
While Elena was unconscious in the intensive care unit, Carmen DeLuca arrived at the hospital with two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash.
Carmen bribed Dr. Ward and the hospital administrator to declare the infant deceased on official birth logs.
They falsified the baby's birth certificate, registered her under a fake abandonment name, and moved her to a private, closed-registry foster facility.
Carmen then had Elena transferred to a private sanitarium under heavy sedation, claiming she was a penniless Jane Doe without family.
Elena survived for three months in that facility, constantly asking for her baby, before a post-operative pulmonary embolism claimed her life.
Carmen had stolen my daughter straight out of the delivery room.
She had lied to me about Elena’s death, faked the baby's demise, and left my child to grow up in institutional care.
And when my grief became so profound that I began searching for adoption agencies years later, Carmen had manipulated the placement.
She allowed me to adopt Renata back under false papers so she could keep the child under close surveillance.
Outside the door, the pounding continued.
“Mauricio! Open this door right now!” Hector shouted again.
I slowly looked up from the documents.
On the sofa, six-year-old Renata sat wrapped in my black coat, holding her knees to her chest.
She looked so small against the dark leather.
Her hazel eyes—Elena’s eyes—were watching me with deep, innocent concern.
“Daddy?” she whispered across the room.
“Why are you crying?”
I touched my face with my fingers and realized that hot, furious tears were streaming down my cheeks.
I walked over to the sofa and dropped to my knees before her.
I took her little, soap-burned hands into mine and pressed them against my lips.
“You are not a stray, Renata,” I choked out, my voice breaking under the weight of the truth.
“You are not an outsider.”
She tilted her head, confused by my raw emotion.
“Grandma said my real mommy threw me in the garbage because I was bad.”
A white-hot rage exploded behind my eyes, hotter than any fire on earth.
“Your mother loved you more than her own life,” I told her, looking straight into her eyes.
“And nobody is ever going to hurt you again.”
May you like
I folded the legal papers carefully and slipped them into the interior pocket of my suit.
Then I stood up, lifted Renata securely onto my hip, and walked toward the locked door.
