My seventy-year-old father-in-law insisted on hiring a young maid. A year later he was growing pale and weak, barely able to stand — yet he wanted to marry her. She was forty years younger.
After my mother-in-law died he lived alone, so we hired Esmeralda, a 29-year-old from a nearby village. She was bright and soft-spoken. At first I thought, “Good — someone to look after him, as long as there aren’t any problems.”
But within months Esmeralda changed. The quiet maid became his confidante. A year later he announced, “I want to marry Esmeralda — she’s carrying my child. You can object, but I won’t regret it.”
The family was shocked. My brother-in-law wept with anger and my husband leapt up, unable to believe it. We all assumed Esmeralda was a gold digger, preying on an old man who was clearly in decline.
A month later, while he was insisting on organizing the wedding, he collapsed in the yard. He spent a week in the hospital and then died. In shaky handwriting he left a will: his assets were to be divided equally among his children, but the house — as a belated wedding gift — he left to Esmeralda and her son.
I thought the shock had ended there. Then, when we went to register the baby, Esmeralda silently handed us a paper: a DNA test. No one expected the result — the baby she carried was not his.
She’d apparently planned a fake pregnancy after seeing his wealth and his loneliness. But then a forgotten paper surfaced: a medical report he had kept. He had long-standing infertility from complications after prostate surgery. He had known — or at least suspected — the truth, but he never spoke up.
Perhaps he wanted, for once, to feel loved again; to live briefly as a husband. Reading his will and holding that old medical report, I couldn’t stop crying. My anger toward the maid dissolved into a deep sadness for a man who had spent his life caring for his children and, in the end, craved one last illusion of being loved.
