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It was love.
I can’t count the times I tried to run after her, check every fucking city in the world, search every fucking house. I didn’t do it, obviously. But writing emails to her became routine. It was my way of talking to her.
I remember a conversation I had with Marc one day—
“What happened, Alex? What have you done?”
“Nothing, absolutely nothing, believe me.”
“This is so out of character for Priscila. And Adrián supporting her? Even weirder.”
“Adrián always supports her.”
“No. Not if he really thinks she’s not acting right.”
“I think your sister is tired of me, that she’s overwhelmed by us. It was me who asked her to marry me, I acted on impulse, I was the one who took her out of the nest too soon.”
“It’s not that. It can’t be that.”
“There’s no other explanation.”
“Fuck.”
When the months passed without any news from her, my friends—well, not exactly friends since I never got close to anyone other than the Cabanas—suggested a skiing trip.
I accepted; I’d been locked up in my house for months, in our house, barely talking to anyone. After my wife’s abandonment I even stopped talking with the water. So I thought that trip might clear my head.
The instant I was settled in my hotel room, I wrote Priscila one last email. It was a way to let off steam, like any other. In it I told her that I thought I hated her.
On the last day of the year, while we were skiing, someone—I don’t even remember who—suggested we could ski off-piste. It sounded fantastic. I needed to feel strong feelings, I needed something to get her out of my head. I couldn’t think of a better way than to throw myself down a slope. And the truth is, I succeeded; for a few seconds I stopped thinking about Priscila. And then I saw the rock and crashed into it.
I was never unconscious, and that was the worst part. My soul ached, every bone in my skeleton ached, and I knew something serious had happened to my body; that I had wrecked it. When people came to help me, I started crying, because I knew something important was going to happen. And because I’d been holding back my tears for Priscila for so many weeks that they all came out together, at the same moment.
I don’t have many memories of the days that followed. But I remember one, the one and only happy thought I had while I was in the hospital after surgery, and that was that Priscila would come to see me. Because she loved me; no matter how angry she was, and no matter how overwhelmed she felt about us, she loved me and she’d come back because she knew I needed her more than ever, and she’d never let me down. She’d come and help me get over this crack in my life, the worst I’d ever come across. A hard and painful rehabilitation, but with her by my side everything would be better.
When Adrián came to visit me I asked him bluntly, “Did you talk to her?” He said he did. “Where is she?” I asked then. “In Boston,” he answered. He didn’t want to give me any more explanations, but I read in his eyes that Priscila was on her way.
She didn’t come.
The two worst bits of news in my life came at once. The doctor told me that I wouldn’t swim again, not professionally; my groin and knee were ruined. And Priscila wouldn’t come. She’d had enough time to be here already. She hadn’t run to be by my side.
I was a wreck when I returned to my house, and it was that way for months. Months in which my brothers-in-law took care of me, months in which I cried in the arms of Marc, River, and Hugo as if I were a fucking kid. Priscila didn’t love me. She’d tricked me, she’d made me believe that she was in love with me, but it’d turned out to be a lie. She was the only one I showed my true self, and she’d let me down.
I would never do it again; I would never give that power to anyone.
Months before, I’d have done anything to know where she was so I could go looking for her. Now that I knew, I couldn’t care less. Boston, China, or Japan, it didn’t matter.
She was to blame for everything. I’d blame her and hate her for the rest of my existence because she’d killed all my dreams, my swimming career, my love, and my trust. She had destroyed everything.
And it was that hatred that made me survive.
At first, I just wanted revenge. I wanted to hurt her, make her pay for what she’d done to me, for causing me to fall hopelessly in love with her and then abandoning me like a dog—abandoning us both, actually, since she didn’t even care about Dark.
I survived thanks to that desire for revenge.
I was locked up at home for a year, barely eating, barely showering, barely shaving. I’d always had very precise goals: swim, and be happy with her. Suddenly I was twenty-six years old and I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. The only two things that had given me wings were dead.
I didn’t feel like doing anything. I didn’t even interact with people, only with my brothers-in-law, who came every day to be with me, to break my balls and drink with me. They listened to me ranting about their sister; they had no idea what was going on either, why Priscila had left, whether she was in love with me or not. They felt just as lost as I did. They didn’t tell me that directly, but I knew it from the way they looked at me, the way they talked to me. From how confused they looked.
