Still no response. Only shocked, parted lips and a rapid intake of breath.
Unable to take any more heartache, I grab my bag.
“You’re rehired,” I murmur, my heart shattering into a million pieces. “I’ll see you at the premiere in a few weeks. Email me if you need anything for work.”
Then I walk out of the airport without glancing back, leaving what’s left of my heart behind, shattered on the airport floor.
Chapter 29
sofía
“¡Sofía, abra la puerta!”
I jolt upright, tumbling off the side of the couch, tangled in a blanket. The horror of my apartment hits me as my mother bangs on the door, yelling for me to open it.
“C’mon, Sofía,” Luisa calls. “We’re here to see you.”
“Mama made food for you.”
Fuck. She brought my sisters, too.
Dirty dishes line the counter tops. Empty coffee cups and chocolate wrappers pepper the coffee table, surrounded by crumpled tissues.Ella Enchantedplays on the television. Laundry covers the floor. I haven’t washed my face in a week, and I’ve only left to go to the lobby to collect the food I have delivered each night.
My hip pops as I rise from the ground, slipping and sliding in my fuzzy socks on the hardwood floor. I grimace as I pass a mirror.
I’m a mess. I know it, and now my sisters and mom are going to know it, too.
The jangle of keys is the only warning I get before the door flies open and my family tumbles in, a range of horrified looks on their faces as they absorb the space.
I’ve always been a tidy person.
This apartment looks like it belongs to someone else.
In a sense, it does. I’m not the same person I was when I left for Australia, and I’m not the same person I was when we landed. I’m nothing more than the shell of Sofía who climbed into the back of a cab at the airport on the verge of tears.
I panicked. Froze.
It was like a movie. All the potential ways it could fail flashed across my mind. I couldn’t believe what he was asking—the exact thing I wouldn’t allow myself to hope for but desperately craved—and the terror caused me to freeze.
Outside of a few work emails, he’s been quiet. No posts on social media. I tried texting him. I composed dozens of messages, only to delete them. Each one feltwrong.
Don’t you feel it, too?
I do feel it,I almost told him.So deeply, and it scares me to death.
But I didn’t tell him in time—not before he took my stunned silence as confirmation of his worst nightmare. And I know he left the airport believing I think he’s unworthy.
It couldn’t be farther from the truth.
The second I got back to my apartment, I crumbled, needing to process. I had a plan. One I spent the whole day formulating. Land in LA. Go back to my apartment with my list and find a way to tell him I don’t want to forget what happened or leave it all behind. A new deal—one that doesn’t involve losing my job.
Instead, he beat me to the punch, stunned me so thoroughly I lost function of my body, and I fucked it all up.
Everything I wanted was right there for me to take, and I let it slip away like sand between my fingers.
“Mija…” My mother trails off, surveying the living room. “What’s going on?”
Her perfume, the nostalgic smell of amber, fills the air, and I crumple in her arms.
