The morning of April 12, 1980, dawned like any other in Toledo. Teresa Munoz woke up at 7, prepared breakfast, and called Daniel, her 9-year-old son, who was still sleeping soundly in the next room. The boy appeared in the kitchen in his pajamas, eyes sleepy and dark hair all messed up.

“Good morning, Mom,” he said yawning as he sat at the table.

Teresa smiled and placed a glass of warm milk in front of him. “Good morning, my love. Do you have a test at school today?”

“Just math, but I studied yesterday, it’s going to be easy.”

Daniel had that calm way of speaking, always confident. He was a smart boy, diligent, liked by his teachers. Teresa was proud of him every day. While her son ate, she looked out the kitchen window at the still-empty street. The neighborhood was calm, residential, everyone knew each other.

“Mom, can I go play ball after class at the park?”

“You can, but come back before 7. Your father is coming home early today.”

Daniel nodded finishing his coffee, put on his school uniform, grabbed his backpack, and ran out after kissing Teresa on the forehead. She stayed at the door, watching her son go down the street until he disappeared around the corner. Then she went back inside and started tidying up the kitchen. It was 8:15 a.m.

The day passed slowly. Teresa went shopping at the market, had lunch alone, watched the afternoon soap opera. Around 5 o’clock, she started preparing dinner. Her husband, Fernando, worked as a mechanic and usually arrived at 7:30, but that day he had let her know he would be back earlier. Daniel should be back from the park before then.

At 6:40, the doorbell rang. Teresa dried her hands on her apron and went to answer, expecting to see her son. But when she opened the door, she found Dona Carmen, the elderly neighbor who lived three houses down. The woman was pale, clutching her chest and breathing with difficulty.

“Teresa, there’s smoke coming out of your house from the back.”

Teresa felt her heart race, ran to the living room, and saw a gray mist entering from the stairs that led upstairs. The smell of burning was strong. She ran up, shouting Daniel’s name, but when she reached the second-floor hallway, the smoke was so dense she could barely see.

“Daniel! Daniel, are you there?”

She tried to open her son’s bedroom door, but it was locked from the inside. She banged hard, calling for him, but there was no answer. The fire was already licking the hallway walls. Teresa tried to break down the door with her shoulder without success. The smoke burned her lungs. Dona Carmen was screaming downstairs asking for help. When Teresa went down, coughing, she saw that two neighbors had already arrived. One of them called the fire department while the other held Teresa back, who was trying to go back inside the house.

“My son is in there. Daniel is in there!”

“Ma’am, we can’t go up. The fire is too strong.”

The firefighters arrived in 15 minutes. When they entered the house, the upper floor was already taken over by flames. It took another half hour to control the fire. Teresa stayed in the street, hugging Dona Carmen, crying and trembling as she watched her house be consumed. Fernando arrived shortly after and found his wife in a state of shock.

When the firefighters finally managed to access Daniel’s room, they found a charred body next to the bed. Too small to be an adult. The forensic examination was quick: death by smoke inhalation and generalized burns. Visual identification was impossible due to the state of the body, but the size, location, and context were clear. It was Daniel Morales, 9 years old, the only son of Teresa and Fernando.

The technical report concluded that the fire started from a short circuit in the old electrical wiring of the room. The door was locked because Daniel had a habit of locking it when he studied or slept. He couldn’t get out in time. He died alone, trapped in his own room, while his mother was downstairs preparing dinner.

The burial took place three days later in a cemetery on the outskirts of Toledo. There was no wake because the body could not be viewed. The sealed coffin was lowered into the ground while Teresa collapsed in Fernando’s arms, unable to stand. The priest prayed the usual words, but none of it made sense. She had seen her son in the morning smiling, eating, alive, and now he was inside that wooden box reduced to ashes.

The case was filed as a domestic accident. No evidence of a crime, no suspicion, just a common tragedy in old houses with precarious wiring. But in the following months, Teresa began to have recurring nightmares. She dreamed she was banging on the locked bedroom door, screaming Daniel’s name, but he didn’t answer. She would wake up sweating with the smell of smoke still in her nostrils. Fernando tried to console her, but he himself was destroyed inside. The couple began to live like ghosts in their own lives.

Teresa was never the same after that night. The first few months were the worst. She would wake up at dawn, thinking she heard Daniel’s voice calling for her. She would run to the empty room and collapse on the floor, hugging the pillow that still held her son’s scent. Fernando tried to help, but he himself was sunk in silence and guilt. He worked late at the shop. He would come home too exhausted to talk. And the two would have dinner in heavy silence.

The house was renovated six months after the fire. Fernando insisted they needed to rebuild the second floor, redo the electrical wiring, paint everything anew. Teresa agreed without enthusiasm. She thought changing the environment would help alleviate the pain. But when the works were finished and Daniel’s room was ready again, she simply locked the door and never entered again.

“We need to move on,” Fernando said one night, sitting at the kitchen table with a beer in his hand. “Daniel wouldn’t want to see us like this.”

Teresa looked at her husband with deep, red eyes. “I can’t, Fernando. I can’t.”

“Me neither. But we have to try.”

But trying was impossible. Teresa quit her job at a clothing store where she had worked for years. She didn’t have the strength to leave the house, to talk to customers, to feign normality. She began to live locked inside the house, obsessively cleaning every corner, as if she could erase what had happened. Fernando paid the bills alone, but money was increasingly short.

Two years later, in 1982, Fernando suggested they move to another city. “We could start over somewhere else, Madrid maybe, or Barcelona, far from here.”

Teresa refused. “What if he comes back? What if he shows up looking for us and finds no one?”

“Teresa, he’s not coming back. You know that.”

Fernando gave up arguing. He knew his wife wasn’t well, that fixation was unhealthy, but he didn’t have the strength to help her. He was too busy trying to maintain his own sanity. The years passed slowly. 1983, 1984, 1985. Teresa remained trapped in that empty routine. She woke up, made coffee, cleaned the house, watched television, and went to sleep. Repeated everything the next day. She stopped leaving the house almost completely. Dona Carmen still visited occasionally, but the conversations were brief and uncomfortable. Everyone in the neighborhood knew about the Munoz tragedy, but no one knew what to say.

In 1987, Fernando had a heart attack. It wasn’t severe, but enough to scare him. The doctor said it was accumulated stress, overwork, smoking.

“You need to slow down, or the next one will be fatal.”

Teresa took care of him during recovery and, for a few weeks, seemed to come back to life. She prepared soups, checked the medicines, talked during dinner. Fernando even had hope that they were finally starting to get out of the hole. But when he went back to work, Teresa regressed again to that absent state.

At the end of 1989, Fernando proposed something different. “Let’s take a trip. Argentina maybe, or Chile. Just the two of us for a few days. Get out of here.”

Teresa thought for a long moment before answering. “Alright.”

The answer surprised Fernando, but he didn’t question it. He bought tickets to Buenos Aires for January 1990. They stayed for a week in a modest guesthouse in the San Telmo neighborhood. Teresa seemed a little better there, away from the house full of bad memories. They walked the streets, visited museums, dined in small restaurants. It wasn’t happiness, but it was something close to peace.

When they returned to Toledo, Teresa maintained a slightly healthier routine. She started leaving the house to go shopping, accepted some invitations from Dona Carmen for coffee, even started attending church on Sundays again. Fernando breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe they were finally managing to move on, but deep down, Teresa had never stopped looking for Daniel. Whenever she saw a boy on the street with dark hair and a calm demeanor, her heart raced. Whenever she passed the park where he played ball, she looked sideways expecting to see him. She knew it was irrational, that Daniel was dead, but she couldn’t help it.

In March 1992, on a Saturday afternoon, Teresa was alone at home watching television. Fernando had gone to the shop to solve an urgent problem. She was changing channels distractedly when she stopped on a talk show broadcast live from Buenos Aires. It was one of those popular shows with an audience, music, people clapping. The host was talking to a famous singer while the camera showed the audience.

Teresa was about to change the channel when something caught her attention: a face in the audience. A young man, maybe in his early 20s, dark hair, shy smile. She felt the blood freeze in her veins. That face, that small mole on the neck, that nervous way of moving his hands. It was Daniel.

Teresa dropped the remote on the floor and stood paralyzed, staring at the screen. The camera had already changed angles, but she was absolutely sure of what she had seen. She ran to the VCR, put in a blank tape, and pressed the record button. She went back to the sofa trembling, eyes glued to the television. The camera showed the audience again a few minutes later and there he was again, closer now, no doubt possible.

“My God!” whispered Teresa, tears starting to flow. “It’s him. It’s my son.”

Teresa watched the entire show without blinking, without breathing properly. Every time the camera showed the audience, she looked for that face. He appeared three more times during the broadcast, always in the same place, third row on the left. The last time he clapped when the singer finished singing and Teresa clearly saw his hands. The way of clapping. Daniel always clapped in a weird way, with his fingers kind of crooked. That young man did exactly the same.

When the show ended, Teresa rewound the tape and watched it again. And again. And again. She noted the name of the show, the time, the channel. She paused the image whenever he appeared, getting as close as possible to the television. That mole on the neck. She remembered kissing that mole hundreds of times when Daniel was little.

When Fernando got home around 7 in the evening, he found his wife sitting on the living room floor a few centimeters from the TV, the tape playing for the tenth time.

“Teresa, what’s happening?”

She turned to him with eyes swollen from crying. “Fernando, I saw him. I saw our son.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

Teresa pointed at the screen. “There in the audience. It’s Daniel. I’m absolutely sure.”

Fernando sat beside her, holding her hands. “Teresa, love. Daniel died 12 years ago. We buried him.”

“I know what we buried, Fernando!” She shouted, pulling her hands away. “But look, look at this.”

She rewound again and paused on the image of the young man in the audience. Fernando adjusted his glasses and leaned forward, studying the grainy and shaky image from the VCR. The face was small on the screen, partially covered by other people, but there was something familiar in those features.

“It could be a coincidence,” Fernando said, his voice without conviction.

“Coincidence? Look at the mole on the neck. Look at the way he moves his hands. Fernando, that’s our son.”

“Teresa, please, don’t do this to yourself. We’ve suffered enough.”

But Teresa had already decided. The next day, Sunday, she went to an electronics store that opened on weekends and asked the attendant for help. She explained she needed to identify someone in a recording. The young man, pitying the urgency in her voice, copied some frames from the tape into photographs using special equipment. The images were blurry and dark, but you could see the young man’s face.

On Monday morning, Teresa was at the police station with the photos, the VHS tape, and unwavering conviction. The investigator who attended her was the same one who had closed the fire case in 1980, Inspector Javier Ruiz, now older and tired, close to retirement.

“Mrs. Munoz,” he said with forced patience. “I understand you never got over the loss of your son. But look, this young man in the photo might look like Daniel, but…”

“It’s not looks like. It IS him.”

“With all due respect, that’s impossible. The body was found in the house. Forensics confirmed it. The case was closed.”

Teresa placed the photos on the table, one by one. “The body was charred. You couldn’t make a visual identification. What if you were wrong? What if that wasn’t Daniel?”

Ruiz sighed deeply. “Ma’am, we followed all procedures. The size of the body, the location, the context. There was no doubt.”

“Then explain to me how my son is alive in Buenos Aires 12 years later.”

The inspector remained silent, looking at the photos. The truth was the image really had a disturbing resemblance, but reopening a closed case because of a blurry photo from a TV show was absurd. It would seem like he was feeding the delusion of a traumatized mother.

“Look, I’ll keep this material,” Ruiz finally said. “I’ll show it to colleagues, see if anyone agrees it’s worth investigating. But I don’t want to create false hope.”

Teresa left the police station with no hope that the police would help. She went back home, locked herself in her room, and cried until she had no more tears. Fernando tried to comfort her, but she pushed him away. She spent the following days obsessively watching Argentine programs, trying to see if the young man appeared again. She called the broadcaster in Buenos Aires, but no one could give information about the identity of people in the audience.

Two weeks later, Inspector Ruiz called the Munoz house. Teresa answered with her heart racing.

“Mrs. Munoz, we talked here with the team and… well, we’re going to reopen the investigation. Officially.”

Teresa almost dropped the phone. “Really? Why? What changed?”

“We showed the photos to a facial recognition specialist. He said there are very specific distinctive features that deserve attention. The shape of the ear, the distance between the eyes, the mole. It’s not proof of anything, but it’s enough to justify a check.”

“And now, what’s going to happen?”

“We’re going to try to identify this young man. We’re going to contact authorities in Argentina, see if we can locate him. But this could take months, maybe years. And Mrs. Munoz, I need you to understand. The chances of this yielding anything concrete are minimal.”

“I understand, but thank you. Thank you for trying.”

When she hung up, Teresa hugged Fernando and cried again. But this time they weren’t tears of despair. It was something like hope. After 12 years living as dead inside, she finally felt that maybe, just maybe, her son was alive somewhere in the world.

The collaboration between the Spanish and Argentine police was slow and bureaucratic, as Teresa expected. Weeks turned into months with no concrete news. Inspector Ruiz called occasionally to update on progress, but the news was always discouraging.

“We’re trying to identify the broadcaster, get the guest list from that show, but it’s not simple.”

Teresa continued her obsessed routine, recording all Argentine programs she could capture via satellite, watching repeatedly, looking for that face. Fernando began to worry seriously about his wife’s mental health. She barely ate, barely slept. She spent hours sitting in front of the television, noting details in notebooks.

“Teresa, you need to stop this,” he said one night. “This is consuming you.”

“Our son is alive, Fernando. I won’t give up on him.”

“We don’t know if it’s him. It could just be someone similar.”

“I know it’s him. I feel it in here.” She pointed to her chest.

In August 1992, 5 months after Teresa’s first call to the police, Inspector Ruiz finally appeared in person at the Munoz house. He carried a brown folder under his arm and a serious expression on his face.

“We managed to locate the young man,” he said as soon as he sat in the living room.

Teresa brought her hand to her mouth. Fernando stood up, tense.

“He lives in Buenos Aires, Palermo neighborhood. Works at a print shop. His name is Santiago Rivas, he’s 21 years old, according to Argentine documents.”

“Santiago Rivas?” Teresa repeated confused. “But his name is Daniel. Daniel Morales.”

Ruiz opened the folder and showed a recent photograph, taken from afar on a busy street. It was him, no doubt, older, thinner, but it was the same face Teresa had seen on TV.

“We did a preliminary investigation on his identity. Santiago Rivas has no documents prior to 1981. He appeared registered for the first time in 1982 as the adopted son of an Argentine couple, Marta and Héctor Rivas. There is no original birth certificate, no entry record into the country, nothing. It’s as if he simply appeared out of nowhere.”

“Because he DID appear out of nowhere!” Teresa was standing now, agitated. “Someone took my son from Spain and took him to Argentina.”

“Calm down, Mrs. Munoz. We still can’t affirm that, but I acknowledge the situation is at least strange.”

Fernando approached the table. “And now, what’s the next step?”

“We need to collect DNA, both from you and him. It’s the only way to confirm if there really is kinship.”

“And how are you going to do that? Does he know we’re looking for him?”

Ruiz shook his head. “No, we didn’t want to alert him before being sure. We’re going to make discreet contact first, explain the situation, ask for voluntary cooperation. If he refuses, we’ll need a court order.”

“I want to go along,” Teresa said immediately.

“That’s not a good idea, ma’am. Let us do the work.”

“He is my son. I have the right to be there.”

Ruiz looked at Fernando seeking support, but the man just shrugged. He knew his wife. When Teresa decided something, there was no argument that would change her mind.

“Alright, but you will only observe. No interfering with the procedure.”

A week later, Teresa and Fernando were on a plane bound for Buenos Aires, accompanied by Inspector Ruiz and an Argentine investigator named Clara Dominguez, who had been assigned to the case. During the flight, Teresa couldn’t sleep. She kept looking out the window, imagining what the moment of reunion would be like. Would Daniel recognize her? Did he remember anything?

They arrived in Buenos Aires on a cold September morning. They went straight to the Palermo neighborhood police station, where a small team was already prepared to make the approach. The plan was simple: Santiago worked at the print shop until 6 p.m. When he left, he would be approached on the street by plainclothes officers who would explain the situation and ask him to accompany them voluntarily to provide clarification.

Teresa and Fernando waited in a closed room inside the police station. The hours dragged on. At 7 in the evening, they finally heard movement in the corridor. Voices, steps. The door opened and Investigator Clara entered.

“We managed to bring him in. He agreed to talk. He’s confused, scared, but cooperative.”

“He’s here?” Teresa got up to go to the other side of the hallway. “But please, let us talk to him first.”

“Afterward you can see him.”

Teresa wanted to protest, but Fernando held her hand tightly. “Let’s wait.”

Another two agonizing hours passed. Teresa paced from one side of the room to the other, unable to stand still. Finally, Clara returned.

“He agrees to take the DNA test, but he wants to meet you first. He says he has the right to know who is claiming he is someone else.”

Teresa took a deep breath, trying to control the trembling in her hands. “Can we see him now?”

“Yes. But please, stay calm. He is very nervous.”

Clara guided them through a narrow corridor to a small interrogation room. When the door opened, Teresa saw a young man sitting with his back to them, shoulders tense. When he turned around, the world seemed to stop. It was Daniel, no doubt, no hesitation, no margin for error. The same dark eyes, the same face shape, the same mole on the neck. 12 years older, but it was him, her son, alive right there in front of her.

Teresa stood paralyzed in the doorway, unable to take a step. Santiago looked at her with a mixture of fear and curiosity, trying to understand who those people were claiming to be his parents. He saw a middle-aged woman with gray hair and red eyes from crying. And an older man beside her, serious and tense.

“Santiago,” Clara said gently, “these are Teresa and Fernando Munoz. They believe you are their son, missing for 12 years in a fire in Spain.”

“That makes no sense,” Santiago replied with a heavy Porteño accent. “My parents are Marta and Héctor Rivas. I’ve always lived in Buenos Aires.”

Teresa took a step forward, tears flowing freely now. “Daniel, don’t you remember me? My name is Santiago?”

“No, Daniel.”

But when Teresa got closer, he instinctively recoiled in the chair. There was something about that face that disturbed him, a familiarity he couldn’t explain, like a forgotten dream coming back in fragments.

“Please,” Teresa extended a trembling hand. “Let me look at you closely.”

Santiago looked at Clara, who nodded encouragingly. Hesitant, he allowed Teresa to approach. She studied every detail of his face, the jawline, the shape of the eyebrows, stopped at the mole on the neck and, without thinking, reached out to touch it.

Santiago pulled away abruptly. “Don’t touch me.”

“Sorry. Sorry.” Teresa retreated her hands to her chest. “It’s just that I… I used to kiss that mole when you were little. Every night before bed.”

Santiago frowned. For an instant something flashed in his eyes. A distant memory, perhaps, or just confusion.

Fernando finally spoke, voice hoarse. “Do you have any memory from before age 10? Where you lived, who you were with?”

“No, my parents always said I was found alone near a train station when I was about 9, 10 years old. They said I was disoriented, no documents, remembering nothing. They took me in and adopted me.”

“And you never questioned that?” Clara asked.

“Why would I question it? They were always good to me. They are my family.”

Teresa sat in the chair next to Santiago, maintaining a respectful distance. “Daniel, you were 9 years old when you disappeared. There was a fire in our house. They found a body in your room. We thought you had died, but…”

“I am not Daniel. I don’t know you people.”

“The DNA test will prove it,” Fernando said. “If you really are our son, it will show in the result.”

Santiago ran his hand through his hair, visibly disturbed. “And if I am, what do you want from me?”

The question caught Teresa by surprise. “What do I want? I want my son back. I spent 12 years believing you were dead. 12 years crying, suffering, blaming myself. And now I discover you are alive, that someone stole you from me.”

“No one stole me. My parents saved me.”

“They are not your parents,” Teresa said, voice breaking. “I am your mother. I carried you in my womb. I gave birth to you. I took care of you for 9 years. And someone took you from me.”

Santiago stood up abruptly from the chair. “I need air. This is madness.”

Clara stopped him from leaving. “Santiago, please, sit down. I know this is very difficult to process, but we need you to cooperate. It’s important for all of us.”

Reluctant, he sat back down. Teresa took advantage of the moment of silence to try another approach. “Do you remember anything from your childhood? Anything? A smell, a place, a person?”

Santiago stayed quiet for a long moment, looking at his own hands. “Sometimes I have strange dreams, with fire and a woman’s voice screaming a name, but when I wake up I can’t remember properly.”

Teresa felt a tightness in her chest. “What name?”

“I don’t know. Something with D, I think.”

“Daniel,” Teresa whispered. “It was me screaming for you that night. I tried to save you, but the door was locked. I screamed your name until I was hoarse.”

Santiago looked at her and, for the first time, there was a crack in his certainty. Something deep in his eyes, an ancient pain he didn’t know where it came from.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” he murmured. “I don’t remember any of that.”

Fernando leaned forward. “Do you have any photos from when you were a child? Before age 10?”

Santiago shook his head. “No. My parents said I had nothing when they found me. No photo, no document, nothing.”

“Convenient,” Fernando said with bitterness.

“And you never found that strange? That there is no record of your life before them?”

“I had trauma. It’s normal to have amnesia after trauma.”

“What trauma?” Clara asked, taking notes.

“I don’t know, but something must have happened for me to be alone at a train station… remembering nothing.”

The session continued for another hour, but Santiago revealed nothing new. He agreed to take the DNA test the next day but made it clear he didn’t believe he was this person Teresa and Fernando were looking for. When he was finally released to leave, he quickly left the police station without looking back.

Teresa collapsed on the waiting room bench. “He doesn’t remember me, Fernando. Our son doesn’t remember me.”

Fernando hugged his wife, fighting back tears himself. “Give it time. If he really is Daniel, we’ll help him remember.”

The DNA test result took 10 days. They were the longest 10 days of Teresa’s life. She and Fernando stayed at a modest hotel in Buenos Aires, waiting. Teresa barely left the room. She spent hours looking out the window, wondering where Santiago would be, what he would be doing, if he would be thinking of them.

On the tenth day, Clara Dominguez called the hotel. “The results arrived. You can come to the police station.”

Teresa and Fernando arrived in 20 minutes. Clara was waiting for them in a meeting room with Inspector Ruiz and two other investigators. On the table, sealed envelopes. Before opening, Clara said, “I need to prepare you for any result. If it’s negative…”

“Open it already,” Teresa interrupted.

Clara opened the envelope and read the document in silence first. Then she looked at Teresa with an expression the mother couldn’t decipher.

“It’s positive. Santiago Rivas is Daniel Morales. 99.8% DNA compatibility with both parents.”

Teresa covered her face with her hands and sobbed. Fernando stood up, stunned, unable to process what he had just heard. After 12 years, 12 years of pain, his son was alive.

“Where is he?” Teresa asked as soon as she could speak.

“He already knows. He received the news an hour ago. He’s in a state of shock, as we expected. He asked for some time alone to process.”

“I need to see him.”

“He specifically asked not to have contact with you for now. He needs time, Teresa. This is a lot for anyone to absorb at once.”

But Teresa couldn’t wait. After the meeting ended and everyone left, she begged Clara to give the address where Santiago lived. The investigator refused, but Teresa managed to find out on her own by consulting the local phone book. Santiago Rivas, 2847 Juncal Street, Apartment 4B.

The next morning, against Fernando’s advice, Teresa went there, knocked on the apartment door not knowing what she would find. Santiago answered in a bathrobe, eyes red from not sleeping.

“You?” he said without emotion. “How did you find out where I live?”

“I needed to see you. I needed to talk.”

“There’s nothing to talk about. DNA proved it, but that doesn’t change who I am.”

“It changes everything!” Teresa took a step forward. “You were stolen from me. Someone took you from our house and brought you here.”

Santiago reluctantly gave way and Teresa entered the small and messy apartment. There were clothes scattered, old pizza boxes on the living room table. He clearly wasn’t coping well.

“I spent the whole night thinking,” Santiago said, sitting on the sofa. “Trying to force memories, but I can’t remember anything. I don’t remember you, I don’t remember Spain, I don’t remember being Daniel.”

“That doesn’t matter. We can rebuild, we can create new memories.”

“You don’t understand.” Santiago looked at her with anger. “I don’t want to be Daniel. I am Santiago. This is my life, my identity. I don’t want to be torn from it just because a DNA test says I’m someone else.”

Teresa felt like she had been punched. “You prefer to live a lie? Prefer to protect the people who stole you from me?”

“They didn’t steal me. They saved me. Whatever I was running from, they took me in.”

“You weren’t running from anything. You were kidnapped.”

The argument was interrupted by knocks on the door. Santiago opened it and found two police officers.

“Santiago Rivas, we need you to come with us. There are new developments in the case.”

At the police station, Clara Dominguez explained what they had discovered. “We investigated Marta and Héctor Rivas’s background thoroughly. They died 3 years ago, but we managed to access old bank records. In 1981, they received a significant transfer from an unidentified source. Around the same time, they bought plane tickets to Madrid.”

Teresa stood up. “Did they go get Daniel in Spain?”

“It seems so. We also found entry records into the country in April 1980, two weeks after the fire. They returned to Argentina with a child registered as a nephew, without additional documentation.”

Santiago was pale. “That can’t be true. My parents wouldn’t do that.”

“There’s more,” Clara continued. “We exhumed the body that was buried as Daniel Morales in 1980. We did a full forensic analysis. It wasn’t a 9-year-old child. It was a boy of approximately 6 years compatible with severe malnutrition. Probably a street child. Someone replaced the body.”

Teresa brought her hand to her mouth, horrified. Fernando, who had arrived shortly after, held her shoulder tightly.

“Who would do that?” he asked. “Why?”

“We’re still investigating, but everything indicates it was a planned kidnapping. Someone paid Marta and Héctor to take Daniel. Someone who had access to the house before the fire.”

“The fire wasn’t an accident,” Teresa whispered, understanding. “It was purposeful to cover up the kidnapping.”

Santiago was trembling. “Now you’re saying the people I called parents bought me, stole me from another family?”

“We’re sorry. But yes,” Clara said gently, “they were accomplices.”

“But why? Who paid for this?”

“That’s the part we haven’t discovered yet. Marta and Héctor died without revealing. We found no records of the original contact. Whoever orchestrated this covered their tracks well.”

Santiago got up abruptly and left the room. Teresa went after him, finding him in the hallway, leaning against the wall, crying.

“My whole life was a lie,” he said between sobs. “Everything I thought I knew about myself isn’t real.”

Teresa approached slowly. “I know it’s hard, but you’re not alone. We are here. I never stopped looking for you.”

Santiago looked at her and for the first time there was something beyond resistance in his eyes. There was pain, confusion, but also a flash of acceptance.

“I don’t know how to be your son,” he admitted. “I don’t know who Daniel is.”

“You don’t need to be Daniel,” Teresa said softly. “You can be Santiago. Just let me be part of your life. Just that.”

He hesitated, then nodded weakly.

In the following weeks, Santiago began intensive therapy to deal with the revelation. Little by little, fragments of memories began to emerge. A song Teresa used to sing, the smell of a specific food she made, small things that were buried in the back of his mind.

The investigation into who orchestrated the kidnapping continued, but never reached a definitive conclusion. Marta and Héctor took their secrets to the grave. The only clue was the bank transfers, but the origin was completely obscured by several intermediary accounts.

Teresa and Fernando returned to Toledo, but maintained constant contact with Santiago. He visited Spain six months later, saw for the first time the house where he grew up, now completely renovated. He entered the room that was once his, now empty and silent.

“I remember this,” he said suddenly, touching the wall. “There was a poster here of a soccer player.”

Teresa smiled through tears. “Yes, Maradona. You were obsessed with him.”

Santiago ran his hand over the wall, feeling something beyond memory, a connection to who he had been before everything was ripped from him. He never completely recovered his memories. Some days were better than others, but slowly he built a bridge between Santiago and Daniel, between who he became and who he had been.

Three years later, in 1995, Santiago moved to Spain. He didn’t move back in with Teresa and Fernando. He needed his own space, his own life, but he visited every week. Sunday dinner became a tradition. One night, while washing dishes after dinner, Santiago said something that made Teresa stop.

“Thank you for not giving up on me.”

Teresa looked at him, eyes misty. “I am your mother. Mothers never give up.”

Santiago hugged her for the first time since the reunion. A long, tight hug, full of 12 years of pain, loss, and finally, healing.

The mystery of who really orchestrated the kidnapping was never solved. Authorities suspected child trafficking, some scheme involving illegal adoptions, but could never prove anything. The case remained officially open, but without new leads.

For Teresa, full justice never came, but having her son back, even transformed, even different, was enough. She had spent 12 years in mourning. Now she had the rest of her life to get to know who Santiago had become. And every night, before sleeping, she gave thanks for that day in 1992, when she decided to change the channel and saw a familiar face on television, for that mother’s intuition that made her recognize her son even after so long, for not giving up when everyone said it was impossible.

Daniel Morales had died in that fire in 1980, but Santiago Rivas had lived, and now, finally, the two could coexist in the same person. An impossible miracle that no technical report, no police investigation could completely explain. Only the love of a mother who refused to accept her son’s death, even when the whole world said she should move on.