Milagros Quispe was thirty-four when her husband Jorge was killed during a robbery at his small electronics shop in Arequipa, Peru, in 2019. The robber, a twenty-three-year-old man named Diego Huamán, was arrested the same night. He had been desperate — unemployed, recently evicted, with two children aged three and five whose mother had abandoned them. None of this mattered to Milagros in the first year of grief. She wanted the maximum sentence. She wanted Diego to suffer.
The Letter from Prison
In 2021, while Diego was serving his sentence, a prison chaplain gave Milagros a letter Diego had written. It was not an excuse. It was not an apology dressed as justification. It was simple: "I took your husband from you. Nothing I say will bring him back. I dream about his face every night. My children have no mother and now no father. I do not ask for your forgiveness. I ask you to pray for my children, because I cannot protect them from here."
The Visit Milagros Did Not Plan to Make
Milagros threw the letter away. Then she retrieved it from the bin. She read it seven times. She told her pastor she felt something she could not explain — not sympathy for Diego but a pull toward his children. She visited the children's shelter in January 2022. She met two small faces that looked nothing like the man who had ruined her life. She went back the next week. And the next. By March, she had begun the adoption process.
The Mother Diego's Children Needed
Milagros adopted Diego's children — Sofia, now seven, and Mateo, now nine — in September 2022. She did not tell them who she was in relation to their father until they were older. She simply gave them a home, meals, school, and the steady love of a woman who had every reason to hate them and chose not to. She also visited Diego in prison — once — to tell him his children were safe. He could not speak. She said: "I forgave you because holding hatred while raising your children was impossible. God asked me to do the impossible thing, and He made it possible." She has not visited again. The children call her Mamá.