Page 7

I’m still at the table with one hand on a folder that doesn't mean what I needed it to mean when I walked in this morning, and the tears won't stop and Diego is talking and I can hear the shape of his voice but not the words, and Mom's hand finds my shoulder and this time I don't pull away.

The Atlantic is going to be beautiful in Cádiz.

I hate that I already know that.

3

ELENA

Time felt as if it stood still, Mama rabbiting on about how this is the best outcome, and I'm almost certain I saw her wink at Jorge's Mama. As if they planned it together, which I shouldn't be surprised by. Mama has always been against the divorce. Jorge could father ten kids with other women and she would still be telling me to stand by my man. Whenever we need to gather as a family we come to O'Gallegho, though usually it's to celebrate something. A birthday, a wedding anniversary, a christening. Not a non-divorce. It doesn't matter, I’ve finally got my appetite back after days of being nervous about seeing Jorge again.

O'Gallegho smells the same as it always has. Garlic and white wine and the deep, briny warmth of the sea, even though the sea is nowhere near here. I have a lot of memories in this restaurant. Birthday dinners. Christmas lunches. The night Dad told us he'd won a case so significant it made the national news and ordered enough food for the entire street. The booth in the back corner where Jorge asked my parents formally if he could marry me, because that was the kind of boy he was at twenty-two, the kind who still believed in asking.

I haven't let myself think about that in a long time.

I slide into my seat and pick up the menu I don't need to read. The laminated card is soft at the edges from years of handling, the Galician coastline printed across the top faded now to something closer to grey than blue. Mama always runs her thumb across it when she's thinking. She's doing it now.

The restaurant is busy for a Tuesday. White walls and dark wood and the low clatter of other people's lunches. The waiter who has been here as long as we have, a man in his fifties named Raul with a white cloth folded over his forearm like he was born with it there, takes one look at our table and understands immediately that this is not a celebration. He pours water without being asked and disappears.

I love him for that.

"Well, I think that went well," Mama says as the menus are handed around.

Nobody answers her immediately. Dad adjusts his cufflinks. Cecilia smooths a napkin across her lap. My brothers are already on their phones, thumbs moving, entirely unbothered by the fact that we just spent a morning in a courthouse watching a marriage be formally unfinished.

"I'll have the chopirones as a starter and arroz negro if someone will share."

Then again I don't need to share it, because I'm so hungry I could eat everything on the table and start on the furniture. I'd spent three days barely managing toast and coffee, my stomach wound too tight to want anything, and then I walked into that courtroom and Jorge was there. I knew he would be, but something inside me snapped loose. All that anxiety, all those days of dreading today, just fell away the moment my eyes met his even if I tried so hard not to look at him.

Even if he was wearing one of his best suits, he looked terrible.

A year of vodka will do that.

I know because I'm the one who watched it start so many times.

"Jorge looked a mess. You're better off without him," Blanca says, reaching across the table for the bread basket before Raul has even set it down properly.

Blanca has never pretended to like him. She watched me fall for him at fourteen, drop out of my law program at twenty to follow him to Manchester, and sit in her kitchen two years ago telling her we were doing IVF — and every time, she listened with the same expression, the one that said I know, I love you, and you’re making a big mistake.

She was right about the last part.

"This is what's wrong with you and why you're still single," Mama says.

She doesn't even look up from her menu when she says it. Twenty-six, and one of the top divorce lawyer’s in the country, and Mom's only measure of success is that Blanca hasn't found a man to stand next to at an altar.

Blanca shakes her head. She has developed a patience for this particular comment that I genuinely admire. She doesn’t care, whenever Mama makes these comments.

“Mama, Blanca's a lawyer. She has won awards. She's the most successful out of all your children," I say.

There’s something about today, about standing in that courtroom in my new short hair with my thumbnail pressed into my palm, has rearranged something in me. Because I would never say anything to upset Mama, but lately I don’t care.

"Thanks sis," Blanca says quietly.

"Yes, thanks sis." Mama sets the menu down and folds her hands. "For defending her. Knowing that your mother wants grandchildren. Cases don't make me happy. Grandchildren do."

"That's why you can't remember their names sometimes," Cecilia says, and the whole table exhales.

I can’t believe Cecilia’s standing up to Mama too. She never does this, like never ever.