A millionaire on his deathbed sees four street children shivering in the rain. In an act of desperation, he adopts them, but when his machines begin to fail, what they do next leaves even the doctors in a state of PCOS. Arthur Monteiro knew he was dying.
It wasn’t a suspicion or the hypochondriacal anxiety of a wealthy, idle man. It was a fact, a fact delivered with the coldness of a medical diagnosis from a luxury clinic in Geneva, printed on thick paper with a verdict that left no room for hope: end-stage idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
The disease was a sadistic architect, transforming his once-strong lungs into stiff, useless tissue, stealing his breath milliliter by milliliter. Doctors gave him months, maybe weeks, if lucky, a few days. These were the final moments of a man who had spent his entire life building an empire only to discover he couldn’t buy another breath.
That night, the rain fell on the city like a veil of cold, endless tears. Inside the silent capsule of his Rolls-Royce, the only audible sound was the almost imperceptible electric motor and the soft hiss of the portable oxygen concentrator. His constant companion watched through the bulletproof window as the raindrops coalesced and slid down the glass like the tears he could no longer shed.
The city he had helped her build with his buildings and investments was nothing more than a blur of neon lights, a distant spectacle that no longer belonged to her. “Mr. Arthur, the humidity is very high,” Dr. Martins warned. “You shouldn’t expose yourself.”
The voice of Elena, his personal nurse, sounded from the front seat. It was competent and caring, the voice of a professional who in the last year had become the guardian of his numbered days. “What difference does it make, Elena?” he replied in a hoarse whisper, the effort of speaking leaving him slightly breathless. “Pneumonia now would only hasten the inevitable. Keep driving, Roberto.”
The chauffeur, a loyal man who had served him for more than 30 years, obeyed silently. He didn’t understand these aimless nighttime strolls, but he understood the pain in his employer’s eyes. They were the rounds of a king inspecting a kingdom he would soon leave behind. A kingdom without heirs.
Arthur had built his empire for his late wife, also named Helen, but she had left before he saw the first tower rise, and fate, in its finest irony, had rendered him barren. There would be no children or grandchildren, just a greedy nephew circling his fortune like a vulture. His life, he thought with deep bitterness, had been a zero-sum equation. He had accumulated everything only to end up with nothing that truly mattered.
It was in that abyss of regret that his eyes, wandering aimlessly across the soaked cityscape, fell upon a scene that shook him out of his slumber. The sight was so surreal, so mathematically improbable, that for a moment he thought the lack of oxygen to his brain was causing him to hallucinate.
Under the eaves of a luxury boutique, whose windows displayed listless mannequins dressed for a summer that seemed miles away, a small, miserable pile of life struggled against the storm. There were four of them, four girls, and they were identical. Four little blond heads, their golden hair now dark and heavy from the rain, plastered to their pale faces.
Four Caritas with the same large, frightened eyes. Four small bodies, perhaps eight years old, huddled together, trying to generate the warmth that the relentless night was stealing from them. They were like four candle flames, fragile and stubborn, struggling not to go out in the midst of a gale. The one who appeared to be the leader, although she had the same face and height as the others, positioned her slender body to protect the sisters from the worst of the wind.
With her thin arms, she held a piece of torn plastic sheeting over the others’ heads, a pathetic shield against the fury of the sky. The frailest of the group, huddled in the center, oozed softly, a high-pitched, piercing sound that somehow managed to penetrate the armored glass and the hum of oxygen to reach Arthur’s heart.
He stopped breathing. The mechanical air continued to flow, but the man inside the body had forgotten its most basic function. The sight of those four girls, an impossible multiplication of vulnerability and abandonment, didn’t cause him pity; it caused him pain, a sharp pain of recognition. He saw himself at age 8, cowering in a corner of the cold courtyard of an orphanage, alone.
But he was only one. And they were four. Four times the hunger, four times the cold, four times the fear of not knowing if there would be tomorrow. Stop the car, he ordered in a voice so firm that Elena and Roberto jumped. “Sir,” Elena asked, turning to him.
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