All Chapters of Rising From the Lie: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

38 Chapters

Introduction: Rising From the Lie

Chapter 1: The Man in the Shadows

Some men were born to live in the dark. Carlos was one of them.From the outside, he had everything anyone could want. A flat in the center of Zaragoza, a car that fit in anywhere, and a woman who looked at him as if the sun rose from his shoulders. Elena never asked questions. She never had. And that, for Carlos, was exactly what he needed.His first job was as a truck driver. That was what the contract said, what appeared on the paperwork, what Elena told her mother when she asked about her husband. Long routes, nights away, entire weeks gone. Nothing unusual for a man who moved goods from one side of the country to the other.But the goods Carlos moved never appeared on any delivery note.He had entered that world slowly, the way most people do — out of necessity, then greed, and finally because there was no way back. It started with small jobs. Moving a package from one point to another without asking questions. Getting paid in cash and leaving no trace. Easy. Too easy. And when t

Chapter 2: The Call

Elena was folding laundry when the phone rang.She almost didn’t answer. It was late; she was tired—permanently tired, the kind sleep couldn’t fix. Four days had passed since Carlos left. He’d called two nights ago: brief, distracted, the same as always when traveling. She hadn’t thought much of it. She never did.The voice on the other end wasn’t his.A man she didn’t know answered. His tone was carefully neutral. That practiced way people have of delivering bad news without letting it touch them. He said he was an officer. He spoke her husband’s name. Then the word: detained.Shock made her body move before her mind could react. Elena sat down on the edge of the bed without realizing she had moved, her hands trembling as the gravity of the call pressed in.The officer kept talking. Words—contraband, organized crime, trafficking—floated into the room. They landed around her like broken glass. She heard them, but they didn’t make sense; nothing arranged itself into order. This was her

Chapter 3: Behind the Glass

The prison was nothing like she had imagined.Elena had driven two hours to get there, Marta sitting beside her in the passenger seat, one hand resting on her arm the entire way. Neither of them spoke much. There wasn’t much to say. The countryside passed outside the window in long, flat stretches, and Elena stared at it without seeing any of it, turning over the same thoughts she had been turning over for days. The arrest. The charges. The life she thought she knew. The secret she carried grew heavier with every mile.She still hadn’t told Marta about the pregnancy.The waiting room smelled like disinfectant and old coffee. Plastic chairs lined the walls, most of them occupied by women who wore the same expression Elena imagined she was wearing — a careful blankness, a face built to get through the next hour without falling apart. She sat down, filled out the forms a guard handed her, and waited. The clock on the wall moved slowly. Everything in that place moved slowly, as if time it

Chapter 4: Alone

Marta left on a Sunday.She had stayed for five days — sleeping on the sofa, making coffee Elena didn’t drink, sitting beside her through the long silences that had taken over the flat. She had held her when she finally cried, really cried, on the third night, when the shock wore off enough for the grief to come through. She hadn’t asked too many questions. That was what Elena loved most about her — she knew when to talk and when to be there.But Marta had a life in Madrid—a job, a flat, a world that couldn’t be put on hold indefinitely. So on Sunday morning, she packed her bag, held Elena’s face in both hands, and made her promise to call every day.“You’re stronger than you think,” she said at the door.Elena nodded. She didn’t believe it yet. But she filed it away for later, for the moments when she would need something to hold onto.Then the door closed, and the flat was silent again.She was six months pregnant by then. The bump was visible now, undeniable, a physical fact that s

Chapter 5: One Night of Forgetting

Paul was eight months old when Elena broke.Not dramatically. Not all at once. It happened the way most things happen — gradually, then suddenly, in a single night that she would spend years trying to forget.Marta had come to visit for the weekend. She arrived on a Friday evening with a bottle of wine and the kind of energy that filled a room, and Elena felt something loosen in her chest the moment she opened the door. For the first time in months, the flat didn’t feel like a place she was trapped in. It felt like somewhere she was allowed to breathe.They put Paul to bed early, left him with a babysitter from the building — a retired woman from the third floor who had offered more than once and whom Elena trusted — and went out, just for a few hours. To remember what it felt like to exist outside the four walls of that flat, outside the weight of everything that had happened.The bar was loud and warm and full of people who had no idea who Elena was or what she was carrying. She dra

Chapter 6: The Second Secret

Three weeks later, Elena stood in the bathroom with a test in her hand and felt the floor disappear beneath her.She had told herself it wasn’t possible. That one night, one mistake, couldn’t compound itself into something this permanent. She had told herself a lot of things over the past few weeks, standing at the kitchen window with Paul on her hip, watching the street below and trying to convince herself that life was moving forward, that the worst was behind her, that she was getting stronger.The two lines on the test disagreed with each other.She sat down on the edge of the bathtub and stayed there for a very long time. Paul was asleep in the next room. The flat was quiet. Outside, she could hear the distant sound of traffic, the ordinary rhythm of a city that had no idea what was happening inside this bathroom, inside this woman, inside this life that kept finding new ways to come apart.She was pregnant. Again. By a man whose name she didn’t know.The first thought that came

Chapter 7: The Lie

She told him on a Thursday.Elena had rehearsed it so many times that the words had lost their shape by the time she sat down across from him in that visiting room, picked up the phone, and looked at his face through the glass. She had practiced in the bathroom mirror, in the car on the way there, in the waiting room while the clock moved slowly on the wall. She had arranged and rearranged the sentences until they felt like something she could say out loud without her voice breaking, knowing that revealing her secret would forever change their relationship and her sense of self.She told him she had gone out one night with Marta. That she had needed to breathe, to escape for a few hours, to feel like a person instead of just a problem waiting to be solved, she told him she had drunk too much — more than she should have, more than she ever had before. That the night had blurred at the edges, and she had made a mistake. A terrible, unforgivable mistake that she had been carrying alone f

Chapter 8: Miguel

Miguel was born on a grey February morning, six months after that visit.Elena was alone in the delivery room again. She had stopped expecting anything different, feeling the weight of her internal conflict. Marta had offered to come, but the timing was off, and the drive was long, and Elena had told her not to worry, that she could manage. She could always manage. That was what she told everyone. That was what she told herself.He arrived quickly, as if he was in a hurry to get somewhere. The midwife placed him on her chest, and Elena looked down at him and waited for the feeling she had felt with Paul — that rush of something warm and overwhelming that had cut through everything else.It came. But it came differently. Quieter. Complicated by things she couldn’t name.She looked at his face and saw nothing of Carlos. Nothing of herself, either, or nothing she could identify with certainty. He was just a baby. Small and red and furious at the world, which she supposed was understandab

Capítulo 9: Ana y Leo

Cuatro años transcurrieron como suelen los años difíciles: ni rápido ni despacio, sino con una especie de persistencia agotadora que lo desgastaba todo un poco más cada día.Elena se había instalado en una rutina que, desde fuera, parecía una vida normal. Se despertaba temprano, daba de comer a los niños, limpiaba el piso, visitaba a Carlos una vez al mes y se acostaba agotada. Había encontrado un trabajo a tiempo parcial en una oficina administrativa local —el mismo tipo de trabajo que había dejado años atrás por insistencia de Carlos— y el dinero apenas le alcanzaba para salir adelante. Marta la llamaba todas las semanas. Su madre la llamaba con menos frecuencia. El mundo se había reducido a un tamaño pequeño y manejable, y Elena había aprendido a encontrar algo parecido a la paz en su interior.Luego, una cálida tarde de abril, fue a visitar a Carlos y algo cambió entre ellos.Ella no lo había planeado. Ni creía que él lo hubiera hecho. Pero había algo en aquella visita —la forma e

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