She was hours old when someone left her in front of a house in the municipality of Santiago, Chile.
Beside her, a handwritten letter and 1 dollar.
It was 1994. The girl did not have a name yet. A family took her in, raised her, made her their own. Today, Paz Álvarez Silva is a lawyer and works helping other people who suffered mistreatment and abuse.
For more than thirty years, she remained silent. Until in August 2026, she decided to tell everything on TikTok: she showed the letter, the news reports from the time, the photos from her childhood with the family that adopted her.
In her account, she explained something no one knew: the letter said that her biological mother was alone, without resources, and that the pregnancy had been the result of rape.
She also revealed that, according to what she was able to find out, that woman became homeless after giving birth.
Paz began a legal search for her origins. She hired help, submitted documents, waited.
To this day, she has not found a single clue.
She does not know whether her biological mother is still alive. She does not know whether one day the letter she kept for three decades will receive an answer.
“I am grateful to my biological mother”, Paz wrote, without even knowing her name.
Sometimes the hardest story to bring to a close is the one that begins with an unsigned mystery.