Episode 5

Chapter 5 - Three Versions of Him

Bela didn't sleep.

She spent the night on the bedroom floor, between the boys' beds, with Davi and Pedro glued to her, both afraid their mother would disappear the way their brother had. Before dawn, Pedro started to burn. Fever.

By sunrise, Bela was already on her feet, Pedro wrapped in a blanket, looking for her flip-flops so she could go down to the UPA urgent care clinic. Her eyes were swollen from crying, her body deep in debt to sleep, when someone knocked on the door.

She opened it expecting the neighbor.

It wasn't the neighbor. It was a woman far too well dressed for that alley, and beside her a tall man in a black shirt, with Miguel asleep in his arms, his little head tucked into the man's neck.

"Miguel!" Bela almost dropped Pedro. "My son!"

Miguel woke at his mother's voice and leaped from one set of arms to the other. Bela knelt in the doorway with two sons crushed to her chest, running her hands over Miguel's arms to make sure. Only after a long while did she manage to lift her eyes to thank the man who had brought her son back.

And stopped.

She knew that face. Not from the streets. She knew it from the dark hole she had never been able to fill, four years of nothing, a spinning hallway, a sensation with no image. Now it had an image. The chin. The cowlick at the forehead. The eyes.

"You," she whispered, breathless.

Rafael wasn't listening. He was looking inside the house, where Davi had appeared in the hallway, serious, placing himself between his mother and the stranger. And where Pedro, in her arms, feverish and burning, turned a flushed little face toward the door.

Two. And the one who had been in his arms made three.

The same chin. The same cowlick. His face.

Rafael Monteiro, who didn't lose color for bullets or news of death, felt the ground tilt.

"There are three," Dona Regina said behind him, grabbing her son's arm so she wouldn't fall herself. "They're triplets. My God, there are three!"

Miguel, oblivious to all of it, broke the silence by pointing at Rafael.

"Mom, this is the nice man! He brought me back!"

Across the alley, a curtain moved. Jessica, the daughter of one of Dona Celia's neighbors, had stopped with a bag of bread and was staring at the scene with her mouth open: Bela kneeling, the three boys, and that man who looked exactly like all three of them. She didn't need anything else. She was already pulling her phone from her pocket.

Pedro chose that moment to cry louder, his feverish body limp, and Bela remembered the present, the hot child in her arms.

"He has a fever. I was on my way to the UPA when you got here. I need to take him now..."

"I'll take him." Rafael already had his arms out. "Give me the boy. My car's down below. You're not walking down this hill carrying a child with a fever. Let's go."

Bela hesitated for half a second. A stranger. The man from that night. The father of her children, the word exploded in her head before she could stop it.

But Pedro was burning, and exhaustion was stronger than fear. She handed him over.

Rafael took Pedro with the awkward care of someone who had never held a child, adjusted the blanket, and for an instant lowered his face and felt the boy's hot forehead against his own cheek. He closed his eyes. When he opened them, something in them had changed forever.

"Let's go," he repeated, softer.

The UPA was packed. Bela knew that line. She had spent nights in it, with a burning child in her arms, waiting three, four hours for a doctor.

That day was different. Rafael went to the counter, didn't raise his voice, didn't threaten. He only said the boy's name and stood there, watching the receptionist. In five minutes, they called Pedro. The other mothers in line looked over, and Bela felt shame and relief at the same time, shame at cutting into a line that was hers too, relief that her son was being seen.

"You didn't have to," she murmured when he came back.

"I did. He has a fever." Rafael said it as if it were obvious, and to him it was. In his world, waiting was for people without power. He had never waited for anything in his life.

They sat on the plastic benches, Pedro's fever already easing with the medicine. Davi slept against Bela. Miguel curled up in Dona Regina's lap. Pedro dozed in Rafael's arms, and Rafael hadn't let anyone take the boy back.

Bela watched it all. Her three children, scattered between those two people who yesterday hadn't existed in her life.

"What are their names?" Rafael asked quietly, his eyes on the boy asleep in his arms.

"This one is Pedro. The one in your mother's lap is Miguel. The one sleeping on me is Davi, the oldest." Bela swallowed. "By ten minutes. They were born almost together."

"Davi, Pedro, and Miguel." Rafael repeated the names slowly, like someone storing away something he didn't want to lose again. "How old?"

"Three. They'll turn four in July."

He did the math he had already done, and his face didn't change, but the hand holding Pedro tightened lightly on the blanket.

"You carried this alone for three years." It wasn't a question.

"There wasn't anyone to share it with." Bela gave a small shrug, but her voice broke. "You get used to it."

"You shouldn't have to get used to it." Rafael looked at the boy asleep in his arms, then at the other two. "Not something like this."

Rafael felt her gaze and turned his head. For the first time since the doorway, they truly looked at each other, without the children, without the rush.

Bela opened her mouth. Her voice came out as a thread, so low only he heard it.

"That night. At Clube Imperial. Four years ago." Her eyes burned. "It was you, wasn't it?"

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