PART 2: THE BIRTH RECORD
“You don’t have a tumor,” Javier told Valeria, placing the test results in front of her. “You never did.”
It took her several seconds to react.
“Then… all this time?”
“They were poisoning you. The medications explain the stiffness, the loss of movement, and almost everything you experienced. They even used a muscle relaxant to make your death appear more convincing.”
Valeria rested one hand on the paper.
For months, she had awakened every morning believing that day might be her last.
She had written farewell letters.
She had given away some of her belongings.
She had cried in front of Daniel’s photograph, begging him to wait for her.
And now she was discovering that she wasn’t dying.
Her father-in-law simply needed her to die.
Javier gathered more evidence.
Nurse Teresa Villalobos, who had worked at Salgado Clinic for nineteen years, admitted that something strange had been happening with the medication ampoules administered to Valeria.
“The labels say Cerebrolysin, but I’ve been preparing medications for almost twenty years. That doesn’t smell like Cerebrolysin.”
Teresa had secretly kept several empty ampoules.
She had also reported irregularities in medication controls weeks earlier.
The report had disappeared.
Javier now understood that Roberto Salgado wasn’t improvising. He had carefully planned every detail.
But they needed to prove something else.
If Valeria reappeared after an official cremation, Roberto could claim she was an impostor trying to steal the inheritance.
“We need to reconstruct your identity from the day you were born,” Javier explained. “Birth certificate, pediatric records, medical files, any old documents.”
“I was born in Guadalajara, at the old Maternity Hospital Number 3.”
“Your mother’s name?”
“Tatiana Mendoza. She died five years ago.”
“And your father?”
Valeria lowered her eyes.
“I never knew him.”
That same night, Javier searched the old hospital’s archives.
By an absurd coincidence, after renovations carried out years earlier, several records had ended up stored in the same abandoned building where he was hiding Valeria.
He found the register for the year she was born.
“Mendoza, Tatiana. Female, age 24. Newborn girl: 3.200 kilograms. 51 centimeters.”
Javier felt something tighten deep inside his chest.
Tatiana Mendoza.
He knew that name.
Twenty-seven years earlier, he had loved a woman with that exact name.
His Tatiana.
Their relationship had ended in the worst possible way when, emotionally devastated by his brother’s death, he began drinking and burying himself in his work.
She had left while pregnant without telling him.
Javier continued reading.
The estimated date of conception matched the final weeks they had lived together.
The space reserved for the father’s name was blank.
Farther down, he found a handwritten letter.
He immediately recognized the slanted handwriting.
Tatiana had requested that her daughter be placed temporarily in the care of relatives while she reorganized her life.
Two years later, another document recorded that the girl would legally receive the surname and family patronymic of the relatives who eventually raised her.
The little girl’s name was Valeria.
Javier sat down on a dust-covered box.
Then he remembered the blood type from the test results.
A negative.
The same as his.
It was an unusual coincidence, but still not enough.
He went downstairs to the room where Valeria was sleeping, wrapped in her jacket.
He stood watching her from the doorway.
For the first time, he noticed the shape of her eyebrows.
Her chin.
The tiny expressions he had seen in his own reflection since childhood.
He said nothing.
He didn’t have the right to say anything yet.
First, he had to keep her alive.
Two days later, Roberto Salgado summoned Javier to his office.
Javier had a small recorder hidden on him.
“Dr. Robles,” Roberto asked with apparent calm, “during my daughter-in-law’s autopsy… did you perform a complete toxicology screening?”
“It wasn’t necessary. The documentation indicated a traumatic death.”
Roberto’s shoulders relaxed.
Then he gave his next instruction.
“Tomorrow, you’ll receive a corrected version of her medical file. The previous one contains errors. Destroy it personally.”
Javier replied:
“Of course.”
The recorder kept running.
214 seconds.
When the secretary brought both files, Javier switched on the shredder in front of her.
But he fed it blank sheets of paper.
The original medical file ended up hidden alongside the ampoules, blood test results, and body bag.
Meanwhile, Valeria’s coffin was sealed for cremation.
She wasn’t inside.
It contained 62 kilograms of material prepared to match her weight.
That night, Javier, Valeria, and Teresa arranged all the evidence across a table.
Eleven pieces of evidence.
The twelfth was a signed statement from a woman who was officially dead.
Javier picked up the file and went directly to a specialized unit of the Prosecutor’s Office.
Before leaving, he looked at Valeria.
He still hadn’t told her what he had discovered in her birth records.
Nor had he told her that he had secretly sent two samples for a DNA test.
Because the results would arrive the following day.
And when he finally received them, Javier understood that saving Valeria from Roberto Salgado was no longer simply a matter of justice.
The woman who had awakened beneath his scalpel might be the daughter he had lost without ever knowing she existed.
