The Barefoot Boy Who Want To Find His Real Father

CHAPTER 1 - THE BOY FROM THE ELEVATOR

"Stay back. Do not come near my daughter."

Alejandro Vargas had said those words in a voice that made grown men step aside.

The ballroom fell quiet around him.

His daughter Sofia stood behind his arm in her pink-and-white party dress, her small fingers clutching the sleeve of his navy double-breasted suit.

Then there was the boy.

Barefoot. Mud on his gray shirt. Dirt on his hands. His chest rising too fast, like he'd run through half the city to get there.

Alejandro barely saw a child at first. He saw danger. This was Sofia's seventh birthday. Reporters had already tried to slip in. Strangers always wanted something.

"Take this boy outside. Now."

One of the hotel guards reached for the child.

The boy flinched and pulled back hard. Then he opened his shaking hand.

A silver pendant lay in his palm.

Old-fashioned. Oval. A rose engraved at the center.

Alejandro's breath caught so suddenly it hurt.

He knew that pendant.

Ten years earlier, he had fastened it around the neck of a woman named Lucia Moreno under a streetlamp in San Antonio, after promising he would come back from a six-month construction contract in Mexico City and marry her. But when he returned, Lucia was gone. Her apartment was empty. Her phone disconnected. Her neighbors said she had left without a word.

The boy looked up, tears streaming down his face.

"Please, do not send me away. I only came to find someone."

Alejandro took one slow step closer.

"That pendant... where did you get it?"

The child swallowed.

"My mother told me to return it to Alejandro. She said he is my real father."

Near the cake table, a woman dropped her champagne flute.

And from the back of the ballroom, Elena Vargas, Alejandro's mother, went pale and whispered, "No. That is not possible."