Page 59 of Deadly Scandals

Mia

Istood in the middle of Disneyland shaking. What on earth was Ashley talking about? She was almost unhinged.

“Excuse me? Come again?”

She walked closer to me and looked deep into my eyes. I forced myself not to take a step back.

“I think that there is a possibility you are my sister.”

Ashley’s words rocked me to my core.

“Start talking, Ashley. Start talking now.”

She maintained steady eye contact and spoke to me slowly.

“What do you know about your mother?”

“I…I know nothing.”

And it was true. I’d found out that the woman who’d raised me was not my biological mother. She was Joaquín’s mother. And I was my father’s daughter.

And I didn’t find this out until they had both passed away.

But now, in retrospect, there had always been so many clues.

Like that time when I was a little girl, and I’d asked her what she remembered about the day I was born. She smiled, looked at me, and just said that I had been beautiful and small. No details like I remembered when Julián was born. Like the way he smelled, how he looked at me and, most importantly, that overall feeling of love when I’d first held him.

When I tried to pry, my father told me to shut up.

And my mother and I didn’t even look alike. She was so beautiful, skin the color of fall leaves, while my own skin was the color of sand.

But my parents took their secrets to the grave.

After Joaquín had been convicted, I had begged him to tell me what he knew about my parents. But he kept their secrets too. And he would probably keep them until his grave.

And I still wondered why.

Ashley interrupted my thoughts. “Well, my sister was kidnapped when I was a little girl. And after seeing that picture of our fathers today, I wondered…could you be my long-lost sister?”

No. It wasn’t possible. I did not want to be related to this woman. A woman who hated me. A woman who’d told my husband to leave me. A woman who’d put my brother behind bars.

I examined blonde-haired, blue-eyed Ashley. “We don’t look alike.”

She laughed. “Well, you look like you could be the star of The Real Housewives of The SEAL Base. I mean, come on. You’ve had so much plastic surgery, who knows what you look like?”

Truth. Ugh.

“Well, I don’t want to deal with this. Definitely not now, since the only thing that matters is finding Sienna, not entertaining your delusions. I don’t have time for this.”

I exhaled. Just ten minutes ago she was interrogating me again about Joaquín. And now she thought we were sisters. It was just too much.

Joaquín was gone now. Locked away in prison for life, never again to taste freedom. I had lost the one sibling who I truly loved. And to this day, I still struggled to believe he had done what he’d confessed to doing to me. And to Julián.

I had accepted Joaquín was sick. But sometimes, late at night, after Grant and Julián were fast asleep, I would walk outside and stare at the moon. Joaquín and I used to sneak out of our home at night and go to Mt. Tam and stargaze. We would tell scary stories and dream about how our lives would be when we were older and had children of our own. To be clear—not children together, but our own children.

These days, the brightness of the moon brought tears to my eyes and a longing to my heart. Because Joaquín is in a windowless cell. He gets one hour of daylight each twenty-four hours. And it was only when the sun was out, never when he could see the moon. He will never gaze at the moon again, our moon. My son will not grow up with Joaquín’s kids, for he will never have any.

And every night, I ask why.