Alejandro Valdés didn’t scare easily, but that afternoon a few words were enough to make him freeze.

— Does Ale still live here?

Mateo, the family gardener, had found a woman in the old greenhouse behind the mansion. She was emaciated, wearing dirty clothes, and she asked him about Alejandro using the name he had only been called as a child.

His mother, Carmen, called him “Ale.”

So did Isabel Navarro, the family’s former secretary.

Isabel had disappeared three days after Carmen’s supposed death five years earlier. Her car had been found abandoned, the apartment was empty, and several documents were missing from the Valdés family’s office.

The police had assumed that the woman had fled after stealing the documents and some jewelry. Alejandro had come to believe the same story.

Victoria, his wife, immediately grabbed his arm.

— Don’t go there.

Alejandro turned to her.

— Why?

Victoria argued that the woman could be dangerous or that someone was trying to take advantage of her mother’s death. Her insistence did not stop him.

The greenhouse door opened.

Isabel appeared from among the overgrown plants. She was thinner, with long, tangled hair, but Alejandro recognized her immediately.

His gaze dropped to the woman’s hand.

On his finger he wore a massive gold ring with an oval emerald.

— The ring was my mother’s.

Carmen had worn the ring for almost thirty years. Alejandro remembered seeing it on her hand the very morning of the alleged accident. After the funeral, the ring had not been found.

Isabel raised her hand.

— He gave it to me yesterday.

Victoria took a step forward.

— Your mother died five years ago.

Isabel looked at her directly, then lowered her eyes to the greenhouse floor.

“Then who are you hiding under the greenhouse?”

Alejandro turned to his wife.

Victoria had turned pale and was clutching an old key in her palm. She tried to hide it in her pocket, but the gesture had been noticed.

Under one of the work tables they found a metal plate covered in dirt. Victoria’s key fit into the lock.

Beyond the trapdoor was a staircase that led down to a room built under the greenhouse. The room had been used recently. On the table were fresh food, medicine, a still-hot mug, and a scarf that had belonged to Carmen.

The woman was no longer there.

Isabel explained that she had been held for almost five years in another family property. She had managed to escape three days ago and returned to the mansion to find the evidence Carmen had hidden.

In the tunnel under the greenhouse he had met this very woman.

Carmen was alive.

“Where is he now?” Alejandro asked.

“He heard someone open the entrance to the mansion and left through the tunnel. Before he disappeared, he gave me the ring and told me to find you.”

Victoria claimed that Isabel was lying. She said the room had been set up during the war and that she only kept the key for safety.

“Then why were my mother’s medications here?”

Victoria didn’t answer.

Under a folding bed they found a metal box. Inside were several letters, a phone, a memory stick, and a photo taken shortly before Carmen’s alleged death.

In the picture, Carmen was standing next to Isabel and a little girl of about four years old. On the back was written:

“If anything happens to me, protect my granddaughter.”

Alejandro didn’t recognize the child.

— My mother had no nieces.

Isabel started to cry.

“That’s what you were led to believe.”

A few months before his supposed death, Carmen discovered that the family registry had been altered. There were certificates, photographs, and medical results that showed that part of Alejandro’s childhood had been hidden from his own family.

The little girl in the picture was named Inés. Carmen had paid for her schooling and treatment through a secret foundation, but she had never told Alejandro who her parents were.

“Is she my daughter?” he asked.

“Carmen wasn’t sure,” Isabel replied. “That’s why she started the investigation.”

Alejandro took the memory stick, but Victoria tried to convince him not to open it.

“This woman disappeared with the family documents. You can’t trust her.”

Isabel looked at her carefully.

— I still haven’t said who kept me locked up.

Victoria was silent.

The recordings on the stick had been made by Carmen. In the first video, Alejandro’s mother explained that the accident in which she was declared dead had been prepared a few days before.

Someone had forged her signature, altered her will, and paid a doctor to identify another body as hers.

Carmen had discovered the plan in time and agreed to let her family believe she was dead. She wanted to know who would take control of the fortune after her disappearance.

Isabel had helped her in the first few weeks. When the two had gathered enough evidence, someone had discovered their hiding place.

Isabel had been taken and held in an isolated house.

Carmen had been moved to the room under the greenhouse, a place she thought even Alejandro didn’t know about.

“Who closed them?” Alejandro asked.

Victoria said she had nothing to do with the disappearances and that she had received the key from the mansion’s manager. Alejandro checked the messages on the phone found in the box.

The last one had been received that morning:

“Isabel escaped. Move Carmen before Alejandro gets to the greenhouse.”

The sender’s number was saved under the name “V”.

Victoria claimed that the phone call had been set up to incriminate her.

Alejandro opened the next recording.

Carmen was holding the photo of the little girl in her hand.

“Inés is my niece, but the test shows that Alejandro is not her father. There is only one explanation. I need to find the child the family erased from all the documents.”

The box also contained a DNA test. This confirmed that Inés was a direct relative of the Valdés family, but was not Alejandro’s daughter.

The little girl had to be the child of a brother or sister.

Alejandro had been raised as an only child.

Isabel pulled out one of the loose bricks from the wall of the room. Behind it was an envelope on which Carmen had written:

“For Ale—the truth about the day you were born.”

The certificate inside showed that his mother had given birth to twin boys.

The first one had been registered under the name Alejandro.

The second one was called Nicolás.

Nicolás was declared dead a few hours after his birth. Carmen had never seen the body and had never received the original certificate.

Five years earlier, he had discovered that the death certificate was fake.

Nicolás trăia.

“Inés is his daughter,” Isabel said.

Victoria tried to leave the room, but Alejandro asked her to stay. Her reaction showed that the name was not unfamiliar to her.

After further questioning, the woman admitted that she had met Nicolás before marriage. He looked so much like Alejandro that he could have been mistaken for him.

“You met me through my brother?”

Victoria didn’t answer.

The photos from the beginning of their relationship had always been taken at night or in places where the man’s face was not clearly visible. Alejandro also remembered several conversations that Victoria claimed had never taken place.

For the first time, he wondered if the woman who had become his wife had originally had a relationship with his twin.

On Carmen’s phone there was a video taken just the day before. His mother appeared in the room under the greenhouse, next to Isabel.

“If you see the recording, it means Victoria moved me,” Carmen was saying. “Don’t let her destroy the girl’s photo. Inés is the only person who can tell them apart.”

“To distinguish who?” Alejandro asked.

Isabel pointed to a drawing the child had made. The picture showed two identical men. One was called “Dad” and the other “Uncle Ale.”

The little girl had met Nicolás.

And he had also met Alejandro without him remembering the meeting.

That same evening, the police located Inés at a boarding school two hours away from the mansion. When Alejandro showed her a recent photo of himself, the girl said the man was her father.

The test proved that it wasn’t true.

“My father has a mark under his ear,” she explained.

Alejandro had the same sign.

Isabel checked his childhood photos. In the pictures taken before the age of six, the mark was not there. It had first appeared after an accident that had left Alejandro in the hospital for several weeks.

He remembered almost nothing from that period.

Carmen had investigated the possibility that the twins had been switched after the accident. The boy raised as Alejandro could actually be Nicolás.

If it was true, Alejandro didn’t even know who he was.

An electronic noise came from the wall of the room. Isabel discovered a surveillance camera connected to a hidden screen.

The image lit up.

Carmen appeared in another room, alive and unharmed. Next to her stood a man who looked exactly like Alejandro.

Victoria took a step back.

The man was looking straight into the room.

“My brother found the ring,” he said. “Now he must find out which of us lived under his name.”

Alejandro approached the screen.

— Who are you?

The man smiled.

— I am the son that Carmen hid. But I am not Nicolás.

Before the broadcast cut off, Carmen held up a photo of three newborns wearing identical bracelets.