“At a friend’s place. I thought it was better he didn’t see you until I’d had a chance to tell you why I called.”
I just nod and let her settle. I haven’t been running from this moment. I’ve been waiting for it.
Nine years of not being able to speak openly with him out of fear that he wouldn’t take it well, or worse, that he’d hate me for it.
I’m not sure how long we’ve been sitting there when I hear the front door open, and with a single breath, I walk toward those brown eyes, so much like mine, now red and wet.
His lip is trembling, and he stands there with his arms crossed over his chest, not knowing what to do with himself.
It’s the first time he’s looked at me without lighting up when he sees me. Instead he’s watching me with something that looks like suspicion, and God, the organ in my chest contracts with a sharp, painful pull.
“Seb, will you come out to the garden with me so we can talk?”
He nods shyly, and we step outside, where the leaves crunch underfoot.
Karina follows, but she stops and leans against the trunk of an oak tree at the edge of the yard.
For her, Sebastian is the living memory of everything we lost. He is our future and the hope that we’ll find our way back to each other as a family someday.
At the far end of the garden are two swings I put up myself when Seb was three. He takes one, I take the other. We don’t say a word, we just sit in each other’s presence, and I ask Dean, silently, to show me how to approach this. He was always the one who knew how to hold an emotional conversation.
Give me problems, give me approximations, give me theorems and their converses, but don’t ask me to talk through feelings, because I don’t know how to resolve them or where to begin.
Before I find the courage, Seb turns to look at me, cheeks flushed, tears ready to fall, and asks me directly, “Why didn’t you tell me you’re my father?”
Twenty-four hours have passed since Silas left, and as promised, I stayed in his apartment last night.
I had to invent an excuse for both that evening and the ones that follow so as not to raise suspicion withtíoFelipe and Lupe, but my twin picked up immediately that something was off.
“Since when do you need to stay overnight to study?” she asks me now, and I genuinely feel guilty that I can’t tell her the truth.
Lupe would never judge me; she’d probably commission a statue in front of the house in honor of my act of rebellion, but I know she’d ask questions I still don’t have answers to.
Like whether he feels for me what I feel for him. Like how this is supposed to work going forward.
“Hey, you know you can tell me anything, right?” I don’t miss the thread of doubt in her tone.
“I know. And I promise we’ll talk at some point.”
She’s not convinced, but her phone buzzes with a message right then, almost certainly from Alek, judging by the way her face lights up. I take the opportunity to slip away to school.
I still have complicated feelings about Lupe’s boyfriend, especially since he asked me, some time ago, to delete footage of him coming to our house. We don’t have many surveillance cameras around the neighborhood, but his explanation was that he’s an important businessman who naturally has enemies monitoring his movements.
To make his case, he even told us that a few weeks ago he was attacked when he was having dinner with an associate.
I had my doubts, but he showed us a graze from where the bullet just missed him, so I complied and deleted the evidence.
Ay Fermat help us all, I don’t like this.
Before I walkinto the lecture hall, I see Professor Camila coming toward me with an odd expression.
“Amalia, I need you to come to my office for a moment.”
This is the first time she’s ever called me to her office, and it unsettles me, because I’m a model student. I submit everything on time, my project is developing really well, so I genuinely can’t imagine what I’ve done.
Her office is at the end of the hall, and the moment I step inside I take in the board covered in algorithms and functions,the white Victorian-style desk, the ergonomic chair with support cushions for the neck and lumbar, and an abundance of flowers. Tulips and roses in various colors.
I must be staring, because she clears her throat.
