Chapter 5 - THE SECRET BEFORE THE FIRST CHILD
Beatriz stood.
Lucía backed away.
“Don’t come near me.”
Beatriz stopped immediately.
I had never heard Lucía speak to another sister that way.
“What did you do?” Lucía asked.
Beatriz looked at me instead.
That was answer enough.
Rachel arrived fifteen minutes later after I called her back to Santa Clara.
Lucía refused to sit.
She paced with Emiliano against her shoulder while Mateo slept on the couch in my office.
Finally Beatriz said, “I gave you medication.”
Lucía’s face changed.
“When?”
“Not tonight.”
“When?”
Beatriz swallowed.
“There were nights you couldn’t calm down.”
“You drugged me?”
“I helped you sleep.”
“You put something in my tea.”
Beatriz said nothing.
Lucía stared at her as if a wall had opened between them.
“What was in those packages?”
“I can’t answer that without explaining the first time.”
“Then explain it.”
Beatriz looked miserable.
“You should.”
Lucía froze.
A strange expression crossed her face—not recognition exactly, but dread.
Rachel noticed it too.
“Lucía?”
She sat down slowly.
“There was something,” she whispered.
I waited.
“Before Mateo.”
Beatriz closed her eyes.
Lucía shook her head.
“No. Not here.”
She took both children into the adjoining room and locked the door.
For the rest of the evening, she refused to talk.
Beatriz was removed from infirmary duties pending the diocesan investigation and told not to contact Lucía.
Sister Miriam, who had spent two years defending Beatriz whenever gossip spread, brought me the infirmary ledger after midnight.
“I found this behind the old medication cabinet.”
Several pages contained dates written in Beatriz’s handwriting.
Not medicine schedules.
Lucía’s menstrual cycles.
Month after month.
Some dates were circled.
Beside three of them were initials: KRS.
Keystone Reproductive Storage.
The first circled date was nearly three years old.
The second appeared shortly before Emiliano would have been conceived.
The third was six weeks before Lucía came into my office.
I felt sick.
The pattern was too deliberate.
But one detail bothered me more.
The first entry had been made months before anyone knew Lucía was pregnant.
Whatever Beatriz had been doing had not begun as an attempt to hide a scandal.
It had begun before there was one.
At six the next morning, Lucía opened her door.
She had not slept.
“There’s someone I need to call,” she said.
May you like
“Who?”
“My mother.”
