We hadn’t seen each other since the divorce.

Behind him, the woman from the daycare appeared, holding a baby boy in her arms. She looked at Pete, then at me, and said calmly,

“I’m glad you showed up… finally!”

“Alice, what’s going on?” Pete stammered. “How did she…?”

Ignoring him, I stepped inside.

A wall covered in framed photos greeted me—wedding pictures, Pete standing at an altar with that woman, the girls dressed alike on what looked like a honeymoon trip.

“Alice… why is Camila here?” Pete asked, voice shaking. “How did she even find this place?”

Alice kept her eyes on me. “Maybe it was meant to happen. Maybe fate wanted her to find them.”

Pete frowned. “Find them? What are you talking about?”

“She’s their mother. Maybe it’s time they went back to her.”

I felt the world tilt.

“What did you say?”

Alice met my gaze. “Those girls… they’re yours. The daughters you were told died.”

“Alice, stop,” Pete snapped quickly. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

But the fear in his voice gave him away.

I looked from one of them to the other. Something was terribly wrong.

Then I slowly pulled out my phone and held it up so Pete could see.

“Pete, you have about thirty seconds to start telling me the truth. If you don’t, the next call I make is to the police. Are those girls my daughters?”

Pete forced a nervous laugh.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Camila. Those aren’t your daughters.”

He denied everything.

I looked at him for a long moment, then glanced down at the phone in my hand and tapped the screen.

“Wait!” Pete shouted, rushing toward me. “Camila, stop!”

My thumb hovered over the green call icon.

“Please,” he pleaded. “Don’t do this. I’ll explain everything.”

Slowly, I lowered the phone but kept it tightly in my grasp.

“Then start talking. Right now.”

At last, he sank onto the couch and buried his face in his hands.

What he revealed during the next twenty minutes was the most horrifying thing I had ever heard.

Pete admitted that he had been involved in an affair for eight months before I became pregnant. When the twins were born, he calculated everything: alimony, child support, two children, and a wife recovering from serious medical complications.

He decided he didn’t want the financial burden. He wanted the girls—but not the responsibility of raising them alongside me. So he chose the most heartless solution he could think of.

While I was still unconscious after surgery, he approached two doctors and a nurse at the hospital who were personal friends. Because they had access to the hospital’s administrative system, they were able to manipulate the discharge records.

Money exchanged hands, documents were altered, and our two perfectly healthy baby girls were quietly released to him as if they had never existed as my children.

Meanwhile, I woke up in a hospital room and was told that my daughters had died—and that he had signed the paperwork confirming it.

Soon after, he filed for divorce and left me to live with five years of grief that had never been real.

Alice had been standing in the kitchen doorway, listening. She stepped forward then, holding the baby against her hip, her eyes red. When she spoke, she didn’t even glance at Pete.

“I thought I could handle it,” Alice said quietly. “I thought I wanted this life. But when Kevin was born, pretending became impossible.”

Over time, Alice had begun resenting the twins. She wanted Pete’s attention focused on their son, not divided among four people. Watching Pete devote more and more energy to the girls while their baby remained in the background became something she could no longer tolerate. So one night she showed the girls a photograph of me and told them the truth—that I was their real mother and that she wasn’t.

She told that to two five-year-old girls, pointed them toward the door, and told them to find me.

I should have been furious at her confession. But all my anger was reserved for Pete—and there was more than enough of it.