“What kind of photographs?” Daniel asked.
“Old ones.”
Maya reached for her phone. Her hands trembled as she opened a hidden folder.
The first picture showed a much younger Marisol standing beside a man near a harbor. The man’s face was partly turned away, but David recognized him immediately.
Thomas Bennett.
His father.
In the next photograph, Thomas sat at a table holding a baby wrapped in a yellow blanket.
Maya.
David sank into the chair.
The room blurred for a moment.
He remembered his father as a tall man with careful hands and a patient voice. He remembered Sunday pancakes, baseball games on the radio, and being lifted onto his father’s shoulders during parades.
He did not remember secrets.
He did not remember another family.
“How old were you here?” David asked.
“Maybe three months.”
“Why didn’t you show me?”
“Because I didn’t know what they proved.”
“They prove he knew you.”
“Yes.”
Maya’s voice broke.
“But they don’t prove what kind of relationship he had with my mother. They don’t prove he was my father. They don’t prove that she was telling me the truth.”
Daniel leaned closer to the screen.
“Did Marisol send any messages with the photos?”
Maya scrolled.
“She said Thomas promised to bring her and the baby to America. She said he sent money for several years. Then the money stopped after he died.”
“Did she mention Eleanor?”
“Not at first.”
Maya opened another message.
“Two months ago, she wrote, ‘The woman who took his name took everything else too.’”
David felt a familiar instinct rise inside him—the desire to reject anything that made his mother appear worse.
For years, he had accepted her version of the past because it was the only one he knew.
Now another version stood before him.
Not proven.
But impossible to ignore.
Daniel asked, “When did Hudson Family Consulting become involved?”
“About five months ago. Marisol told me that a foundation connected to Thomas’s estate was finally helping her. She said I needed to make small payments for processing and medical documents before the insurance funds could be released.”
“That sounds like a scam,” Daniel said.
