I Heard Her Cry

Brussels, February 2026. Lucía Morales is a midwife; in seventeen years she has delivered just over two thousand babies, and she tells frightened mothers that we always show the baby. For Christmas, her daughter gave her a DNA test. The results come in: 312 matches, and not a single name she knows. Not her cousin Nadia, who took the same test. Not her father's nephew.

Her mother, Charo, eighty years old, refused to spit in the tube: “It's against God.” Then one night, at 3.12 a.m., a notification arrives: “Inmaculada O. — Sister — Sevilla”.

Seville, Saturday 30 March 1985. Amparo, eighteen, gives birth in a private clinic where her mother cleans. She is told the baby didn't breathe, that it's better not to see it, that everything has been taken care of. She heard two cries. She says so again and again, so loudly that in her neighbourhood they call her nothing but *la loca*.

Forty-one years later, from Triana to the Polígono Sur, between Holy Week and the Feria, Lucía sets out to find out who she is. A pious grandmother, an uncle who is far too helpful, a nun behind a wooden revolving hatch, and the woman who raised her: everyone lies to her. The only one who never lied is the one everybody thought was mad.

Inspired by the real scandal of Spain's stolen babies; the characters, the clinic and the institutions are fictional. Contains child abuse, forced psychiatric confinement and domestic violence, without gratuitous description.