“I won’t keep you, Amalia, but I need an explanation.”
I frown at the phrasing, but before I’ve run through the possible scenarios, she pushes an envelope toward me. My heart starts beating too loudly because I have a feeling, and it isn’t a good one.
My fingers ease the photographs out of the envelope, and I nearly congratulate myself for not fainting at what’s in front of me.
Photos of me entering Silas’s building. Photos from a few days ago, at the café where we went together.
I know my eyes give me away, but I slide the images back into the envelope and straighten my spine.
“I don’t understand what the problem is,” I tell her, because there’s nothing incriminating visible in those photographs. “We’re two adults having coffee in the same place. I can explain why I stopped by his building?—”
“Amalia, in this case I’m choosing to treat your intelligence as your lifeline. Please don’t insult my judgment. What’s happening here is obvious enough, and even if it weren’t, these photographs are sufficient to cause a scandal.”
I watch the woman who has been my example, a mentor, radiate bitterness and something mean. At what point did she start caring whether Silas sees someone or not?
And then I see it.
The jealousy in her eyes. The way her entire body is rigid.
And I find myself wondering whether she was involved with Silas, whether there was ever something more between them, because I can’t justify the hate I sense coming from her.
But she’s right, it doesn’t matter that there’s nothing explicit in these photographs. They’re enough to generate gossip.
Gossip about Silas’s integrity. Gossip about how I earned my grades.
Nobody wants the truth when the lie is more interesting.
I don’t answer her. I have nothing to negotiate with, so I wait to see what she wants. There’s a reason these photographs are in front of me and not on the dean’s desk.
“You’ll transfer to the Technological Institute of Monterrey. They have an exceptional program, and no one will know anything. In exchange, Silas will continue teaching here, with no one seeing these photographs. However respected he is, they would follow him to any university he tried to apply to afterward.”
Every scenario and every possibility spins through my head, every lie I’d have to produce to make it possible, and I feel physically sick. I can taste something sour imagining Lupe’s face, andtíoFelipe’s, when I have to find a reason to leave the city.
But this isn’t about me. It’s about Silas. A brilliant man whose entire career would be called into question because of this relationship. A relationship I’m equally responsible for. Maybe if I hadn’t pushed, maybe if I’d held the distance a little longer. Maybe I wouldn’t know what it feels like to be the center of his attention, and this whole scenario wouldn’t hurt this much.
I nod to show I’ve understood, and in the next moment she slides a transfer contract across the desk. My hand trembles as I sign my name on the dotted line, but something quiet settles inside me at the thought that I won’t cause any harm to the man I love.
Because in this moment, there is not a single trace of doubt in me about what I feel for him.
“When does the transfer take effect?” I ask, forcing myself to hold her gaze.
“Tomorrow.”
Twenty-four hours. I’ll have time to talk to him and find a way through this together. It’s not a tragedy to be at another university. There are breaks between semesters. But while I’m running through these thoughts, she says, ”You know, Amalia, it may not seem like it, but I’m protecting you right now. You’re not yet twenty; you have your whole life ahead of you. Trust me when I say you don’t want to associate yourself with a married man, who also happens to be your professor.”
My mind catches on the wordmarried,and I try to hide the shock. What do you mean married? Married, as in…he has a wife? All this time, he had a family somewhere else?
I feel my morning sandwich working its way back up as the image she’s planted takes shape in my mind.
Is that why he never mentions his family? Is that why he left in such a hurry…to be with her?
Ay Diosito,what have I done?
Every moment he avoided bringing up his family, every time I thought I caught a flash of guilt in his eyes, why didn’t I think harder about it?
Because you didn’t listen to reason,my mind whispers, and I have to swallow several times to keep from being sick right here.
“I take it you didn’t know. He has a wife in Pennsylvania and a nine-year-old boy.” Her hand pushes a piece of paper toward me, a birth certificate for a boy named Sebastian Vaughn. And in the father field: Silas Vaughn.
