Episode 4

Chapter 4 - Mom's Number

It didn't take even two hours.

When the man from Morro do Falcao orders a search, the city knows where to look. The van was found in a warehouse in the North Zone before midnight, Seven and two others on the floor with their hands on their heads, and the boy came out in the arms of one of Rafael's men, dirty, missing one flip-flop, but whole.

Rafael had given the order twice: not a scratch. No one touched him.

Dona Regina was the one who received Miguel at the door.

"Oh, my God, sweetheart." She crouched, and the boy, who had held himself together for the whole trip, collapsed into her arms. Dona Regina hugged him tight and felt his little body shaking. "There. It's over. No one is going to hurt you anymore."

She took Miguel to the kitchen, warmed chocolate milk, and sat him in her lap wrapped in a blanket. Rafael watched from the doorway, without going in. In his world, rescuing the boy had been the problem, and the problem had already been solved. No one had explained what to do with the boy afterward, there, warm and alive, drinking chocolate in his grandmother's lap.

His grandmother's. The thought came on its own, and he shoved it away.

"Miguinho, do you remember your mother's phone number?" Dona Regina moved the mug aside. "We need to call her."

The boy sniffled and recited it. Eleven numbers, in the right order, in the singsong way children memorize things.

"You know the whole number?"

"Mom told me to memorize it. She said if I ever got lost, I had to say the number. Always."

Something tightened in Rafael's chest. A woman who taught a three-year-old son to memorize her phone number because she knew one day she might not be close enough to protect him. He knew that kind of fear. He just hadn't known some mother on some hill carried it too.

He typed the numbers himself and put the call on speaker.

Half a ring.

"HELLO?!" Her voice was cracked from screaming. "Hello, who is this? Is it about my son? For the love of God, did someone see my..."

"Mom?"

The world on the other end stopped.

"Miguel." A sob that was almost a scream. "Is that you, baby? Are you there? Talk to Mom, are you hurt, where are you..."

"Mom, I'm okay!" Miguel leaned over the phone. "Don't cry! Auntie Regina gave me hot chocolate!"

On the other side there was only crying. The cry of someone who had spent hours falling through a pit and suddenly felt ground beneath her feet.

Rafael listened in silence, one hand over his mouth. He couldn't say anything.

"Who are you with, baby?"

"With Auntie Regina and a man."

Before Rafael could take the phone, Miguel had already turned his attention back to Dona Regina, the way children do, the fright dissolving quickly in the warmth of a lap.

"Auntie, do you have children?"

"I have three, my love. All grown up."

"I have brothers too. Two, Davi and Pedro. We're triplets." Then he said the simplest thing in the world, the thing that split the night in half. "But we don't have a dad. We only have Mommy, me, Davi, and Pedro."

The smile died on Dona Regina's face. She lifted her eyes over the boy's head and found her son's. She said nothing. It was all there in her look: the question, the certainty, and the enormous thing that had just entered that house and would never leave again.

Rafael held his mother's gaze. Then he took the phone, turned off speaker, and brought it to his ear.

"You're his mother," he said, his voice lower than he meant it to be. "He's safe. He's with me. He has everything he needs."

"Thank you." The words came broken, a hundred times over. "Tell me where you are, I'll come get him, I'll go now..."

"No. You're not going anywhere at this hour, alone, after what you've been through. I'll bring him. Tomorrow morning. I'll bring him myself."

He hung up before she could argue. He stared at the phone, no contact name on the screen, only eleven numbers a three-year-old had memorized like a song.

One of his men waited in the doorway.

"Boss, what about the guys from the warehouse? Seven and the others."

Rafael glanced toward the kitchen, where Miguel dozed in his mother's lap, too far away to hear.

"The so-called 'Enzo's father,' the one who handed the boy off in the bathroom?"

"Gone, boss. Carlos Santos, the name he gave at the daycare. But he was too cold to be a worried father. The kind of guy who's done this before. A professional. Probably not even his name."

It wasn't. Men like that changed names the way they changed shirts. Rafael knew the type, the ones who kidnapped children for money and slept just fine. He filed the face away with the rest.

"Find him. No rush, but find him." His voice didn't change tone, and that was why it chilled. "And the one who touched the boy, Seven, he doesn't walk out."

The young man nodded and vanished.

Dona Regina, returning with a blanket for Miguel, heard the end and said nothing. She had known for a long time what world her son lived in. She only pressed her lips together and covered her grandson.

"I'm going with you." Dona Regina spoke softly so she wouldn't wake Miguel, but with a firmness that allowed no answer. "Tomorrow. I'm going with you to take this boy home."

"You don't even know if they're mine, Mom."

"I know, son." She adjusted the blanket over her grandson. "I looked at that face and knew right away. A mother recognizes the blood of her blood. And tomorrow I want to see the woman who gave me three grandchildren and raised them alone, without asking anyone for anything."

Rafael, who commanded an entire city and obeyed no one, only nodded.

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