filled with tears.
I thought something was wrong with my son.
“What’s happening?” I demanded.
“Is he sick?”
Ana examined the baby and assured me that the mark appeared harmless.
But Michael looked devastated.
“Who is the father?” he asked.
“Lucas Bennett.”
Michael sat down.
His shoulders shook.
“My son,” he whispered.
“That’s my son.”
The crescent-shaped mark, he explained later, had appeared beneath Lucas’s left ear when he was born.
Michael’s own mother had carried a similar mark.
It wasn’t scientific proof of parentage, but seeing it had brought back a memory so powerful that he could barely speak.
Then he told me something I wasn’t prepared to hear.
“Lucas didn’t abandon you,” Michael said.
“He was in a terrible accident.”
I stared at him.
“That’s impossible.”
“Seven months ago, he was struck by a car while crossing an intersection.
He suffered a traumatic brain injury and multiple fractures.”
I shook my head.
“He sent me a message that night.”
“What time?”
“Ten fourteen.”
Michael went pale again.
“The ambulance brought Lucas to the emergency department at eight fifty-one.
He was unconscious when they arrived.”
For several seconds, I could only hear the soft electronic beeping beside my bed.
The message.
The cruel words.
Seven months of believing I had been thrown away.
Someone else had written them.
“Is he dead?” I asked.
Michael looked at me.
“No, Camila.
Lucas is alive.”
I began crying before he could say anything else.
Michael explained that Lucas had spent weeks in intensive care, followed by months of neurological rehabilitation.
His recovery had been slow.
Although he could understand far more than he could say, speaking and writing still required extraordinary effort.
“Where is he?” I whispered.
“At a rehabilitation center outside the city.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
His expression changed.
“Rebecca told me you ended the relationship.
She said she contacted you after the accident and that you wanted nothing to do with Lucas.”
I stared at him.
“Rebecca?”
“My daughter.
Lucas’s older sister.”
I remembered the unfamiliar woman’s voice on Lucas’s phone.
Stop humiliating yourself.
“Your daughter told me Lucas didn’t want me,” I said.
“She never mentioned an accident.”
Michael lowered his head.
“I believed her,” he said.
“That is something I will regret for the rest of my life.”
He took a photograph from his phone and showed me a young man seated beside a rehabilitation therapist.
Lucas.
His hair was shorter, his face thinner, and there was a small scar near his eyebrow.
But those eyes were unmistakable.
I touched the photograph.
“Does he remember me?”
Michael opened another image.
It showed a notebook on a table.
Across the page, in uneven capital letters, someone had written my name.
CAMILA.
Underneath it was a crooked little drawing of a heart.
I pressed my hand over my mouth.
Michael told me Lucas had repeatedly tried to communicate something about me, but Rebecca insisted he was distressed about our supposed breakup.
He had accepted her explanation because he trusted her.
Then Michael’s phone rang.
A nurse from Lucas’s rehabilitation center was calling.
I watched his expression harden.
“Transferred where?” he demanded.
After listening, he asked for an independent evaluation of Lucas’s ability to make his own care decisions before any transfer.
He ended the call and looked at
