Their smiles bloomed at the same moment—identical, effortless, as if practiced long before this day.

“Hi,” the boy said quietly. His voice was gentle, untouched by the streets. “Do you see me when you dream?”

Mateo’s eyes lit up.

“Yes,” he said. “Every night.”

Daniela approached slowly. Her legs felt weak, as if she were walking on sand. She saw how the two children compared their hands, how they touched each other’s hair, how they laughed with a confidence that can’t be learned in an afternoon.

“What’s your name?” Mateo asked.

“Pablo,” the boy replied, shrinking back slightly when he noticed Daniela. “And yours?”

“Mateo. Look… we almost have the same name.”

Daniela felt a sharp pain in her stomach. She forced herself to breathe.

“Excuse me, Pablo…” she said carefully, as if walking on thin ice. “Where are your parents?”

Pablo looked down and pointed to a nearby bench. There, a thin woman, around fifty years old, slept clutching an old bag. Her clothes were dirty and her face was tired, as if life had weighed more heavily on her than it should have.

“Aunt Consuelo takes care of me,” Pablo murmured. “But sometimes she gets sick.”

Daniela pressed her lips together. Something inside her screamed that this wasn’t a coincidence. But another part of her, the part that had survived the depression of the first months of motherhood, wanted to run away. To keep the mystery. To return to the familiar life, even if it was built on questions.

“Mateo,” she said, taking his hand more tightly than necessary. “We’re leaving. Now.”

Mateo turned away, his eyes brimming with tears, as if something were being ripped from him.

“I don’t want to leave. I want to stay with my brother.”

The word “brother” landed like a thunderclap. Mateo had never asked for a brother, never even spoken of one… until that moment. Daniela felt everything she had tried so hard to deny begin to crumble.

“He’s not your brother,” she blurted out, too quickly. “You don’t have any brothers.”

“Yes, I do,” Mateo cried. “I know I do. He talks to me every night.”

Pablo came closer and touched his arm with a tenderness unusual for a child who lived on the streets.

“Don’t cry… I don’t like it when we’re apart either.”

Daniela scooped Mateo up in her arms, ignoring his protests, and walked away with hurried steps. But even from a distance, she felt Pablo’s gaze following them, and she saw—or thought she saw—a tear roll down his dirty cheek.

In the car, Mateo repeated over and over, like a hammer, “Why did you leave my brother alone, Mom? Why?”

Daniela drove with trembling hands. The plaza was receding into the distance, but Pablo’s face remained, etched in her mind. And with it, those strange gaps in her memories of the birth: the anesthesia, the silence, waking up with Mateo in her arms, and an inexplicable feeling of absence, as if something hadn’t quite clicked.

When they got home, Ricardo was in the yard watering plants. He smiled when he saw them… and then worried when he saw Daniela’s face.

“What happened?”