Two sisters.
The news hit like a slap in the face. It was one thing to suspect something, to consider a possibility. It was something else to receive confirmation that there were, indeed, real blood relatives. My father had betrayed me and my mother. He’d raised two daughters, whom he probably loved more than me, while I’d waited for him to return to Spain for over two decades. But he was never planning to come back, I now realized. He’d made a new life without us, discarding us like an old newspaper. What an idiot I’d been—religiously writing all those letters to him, sitting for hours by the window, drawing his portrait. In my childhood innocence, I’d always expected him to walk through the front door, his arms filled with presents, and then take me on one of his adventures.
“Angélica is the eldest,” he said. “Well, in reality, there is a brother, too. But he renounced his inheritance.”
A brother as well. And he renounced the fortune?
“He’s a priest.” Aquilino stared at his cigar with appreciation. “He took the vow of poverty.”
A priest, of all things. My father hadn’t been a religious man, not according to my mother’s recollections. Then how did he produce a priest? I, myself, was filled with doubts. Although I would never voice them out loud. But if it was true that this brother had renounced my father’s money, had it been a voluntary vow or a forced one?
“What about their mother? Is she also an heir?”
“No, Do?a Gloria Alvarez passed away a few years ago. But we’ll get into all the details tomorrow.”
My father had hidden so many things from us. It stung worse than his death. Good thing my mother hadn’t lived to see so much deceit. Another woman, another family. Did he think he could make amends by leaving me a portion of his estate? What good would that do when I never had him? I would never know what his voice sounded like, what cologne he used, or feel the warmth of his hugs.
A thump against the window startled us both. We moved toward the pane in time to see a speckled bird wrecked on the pebbles outside the house.
“A sparrow-hawk,” Aquilino said.
I remained silent, unable to keep my eyes from the dying bird.
“The poor creature must not have seen the glass,” he went on. “It didn’t know what it was getting itself into when it came here.”
CHAPTER 2
Two weeks earlier
It took us a week aboard the Valbanera to arrive in La Habana, my first taste of the American continent with its colonial buildings, narrow streets, and tantalizing beaches. But we didn’t have time for sightseeing as almost immediately we had to board our next ship, the Andes, a British vessel that was three times the size of the Valbanera. Not that Cristóbal would’ve agreed to any sightseeing with me anyway. He’d spent the entire week aboard locked in our cabin, typing.
The clerk at the reception desk had a perfectly bald head filled with moles, like a spotty mango.
“Your name, sir?” he asked.
“Cristóbal de Balboa, and this is my wife, María Purificación de Lafont y Toledo.”
Cristóbal tapped his fingers on the desk—repeatedly—while the clerk wrote our names as if there weren’t dozens of passengers standing behind us. Cristóbal had little patience for incompetence, a trait I never quite understood since he had a temperate disposition and always avoided conflict. His way of expressing his frustration was to burst into a variety of tics: tapping his foot, scratching the back of his head, loosening his tie, chewing his nails to the quick. It was as if his body expressed what his voice couldn’t.
“Purificación,” the clerk said slowly. “With a c or an s?”
“C,” Cristóbal said, curtly.
My husband had little to no awareness of his many habits or the effect he had on others, especially women. He never noticed when our female customers stared at him or groomed their hair while he took their order or handed them a warm cup of chocolate. I could see why they were enthralled by him. Cristóbal was already thirty-four years old, but he took care of his appearance and of his hygiene. His beard was always trimmed and his necktie always straight. Most of all, he was attentive and kind and had an aloof quality that made women feel at ease in his presence. I couldn’t deny that I’d been fortunate that my mother hadn’t found me an old, fat man to marry. Ours was certainly not a problem of attraction.
Cristóbal turned to me, sighing.
Ours was a problem of affinity.
While my husband spelled out my last name for the clerk, I had a feeling that someone was watching me. I turned my head as discreetly as possible.