PART 2
Lucas didn’t throw his arms around me. He didn’t cry with sudden happiness.
He simply held the small gold locket in his trembling, water-pruned hands and stared at the picture.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “I don’t remember this little girl.”
It felt as though someone had reached inside my chest and ripped out my heart.
For twenty years, my family had told me my father died in a devastating house fire in our old neighborhood. The firefighters never found a body, but the building had been reduced to ashes, and everyone assumed no one could have survived.
I was only ten.
After the fire, an aunt took me in and raised me. At twenty-one, I met Julian, but I never stopped wondering what had really happened on that terrible night.
Now my father was sitting in my bathtub.
Alive.
Yet to him, I was a complete stranger.
When we went downstairs, Julian was waiting in the living room.
I walked straight toward him, tears streaming down my face. “You knew, didn’t you? You brought him here on purpose!” Julian gently shook his head. “I wasn’t completely sure, Mariana.”
He admitted that while volunteering at the shelter, two particular details had caught his attention: Lucas’s estimated age and a long, uneven burn scar stretching across his left wrist. Years earlier, I had told Julian that my father had burned that same wrist while cooking when I was little.
“I thought it might just be a bizarre coincidence,” he explained softly. “That’s why I brought him here. I needed you to see him before I gave you false hope.” I crumbled against his chest, sobbing uncontrollably.
The following morning, we took Lucas to one of the top private neurologists downtown. After extensive brain scans and cognitive assessments, the doctor explained that the intense physical and emotional trauma Lucas had endured twenty years earlier had caused profound psychogenic amnesia.
“Do not force his memories,” the doctor warned us gently. “Old photographs, familiar places, smells, childhood songs… any sensory stimulus tied to his past life might unlock a door. Let it happen naturally.”
During the weeks that followed, I turned our suburban house into a living museum of my childhood.
I brought out our old photo albums. I baked the hot cinnamon rolls he once made for me every Sunday morning. I played the old jazz records he used to listen to while cleaning the house. I drove him to the park where he had once bought me ice cream after school.
Nothing.
Lucas gave me polite smiles, but there was never any spark of recognition in his eyes.
One afternoon, he gestured toward a framed black-and-white photograph sitting on the fireplace mantle. A beautiful woman stood beside a young Lucas.
“Who is she?” he asked quietly.
A heavy knot tightened in my throat. “That’s my mother. Eleanor.”
“Where is she?”
I couldn’t respond.
“Mariana,” he pressed, looking deeply into my eyes. “What happened to her?”
I rose and immediately turned the photograph face down. “That can wait, Dad.”
I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. For twenty years, I had carried the belief that my mother had died because of me.
A week later, I chose to take Lucas back to the street where our old home had once stood. The property where my childhood house had been was now occupied by a pharmacy and a strip mall.
Lucas gazed through the car window, his expression completely empty. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he whispered. “I don’t recognize any of this.”
“It’s okay, Dad,” I said, forcing myself to hide my heartbreak.
We got out of the car and walked along the sidewalk toward a nearby park.
Without warning, the deafening blast of a truck horn tore through the air, followed by the harsh screech of tires. A distracted driver in a large pickup truck had mounted the curb and was heading directly toward us at forty miles an hour.
I froze in complete panic, unable to move.
Lucas reacted instantly.
He lunged forward, pushing me aside with incredible force.
I crashed onto the pavement, scraping my hands and knees. The truck missed us by only inches before violently slamming into a metal utility pole farther down the block.
When I managed to get back up, my father was kneeling on the concrete, struggling for breath, his body trembling violently.
Then he started to cry.
But his tears weren’t caused by the shock of the near-accident.
He turned toward me and stared with an intensity I hadn’t seen since I was ten years old.
“Marianita…”
My heart stopped. No one in the world had called me Marianita since I was a child.
Lucas pressed both hands against his temples, tears running down his face.
“I remember…” he gasped, his voice trembling. “I remember what happened to your mother.”
