23. Alejandro
Alejandro
It's been four months since Bee said her peace, and her father accepted it. Four months of Sundays when I’m home, things are comfortable and real—church beside her, lunch after, Senoras pressing pastelitos into my hands and telling me I look too skinny while Bee laughs and steals the first bite.
The first couple of months I was away, I would set my phone against a water glass and FaceTime into the dining room.
Bee would carry me around like a cinematographer, narrating the arroz, the roast, the gossip.
Senor Ayala started these lunches barely looking at the screen.
Then he began to nod. Then he asked how many minutes I logged in recovery boots.
Then he told me where he found the sweetest mangoes, nothing huge, but something that added up.
When June rolled around and Bee was done with the school year, she joined her first away game with me and the team.
Let me say, having her alone in a hotel room is almost too much for me to handle.
Even when my legs are sore and aching from a game, I can’t help but dip between her legs and have my fill of her.
Today, I drop Bee at the South Pointe beachfront with her sister, the two of them laughing with the wind in their hair, sandals dangling from fingers, the kind of easy we’ve been starving for.
I watch until Andrea loops her arm through Bee’s and drags her toward the water.
Bee glances back, blows me a kiss, mouths adios. I tap my heart. Then I head home.
I set my keys on the entry table, toss my cap onto the couch, and step outside. Sun on the tile. Salt in the air. I sink into the chair, stretch my legs, and think about nothing for the first time in days.
My phone rings before the tide can turn. Senor Ayala flashes across the screen. Mid-afternoon. No warning. Not a small talk person. Ever. My stomach tightens anyway.
“Alejandro,” he says when I answer. Formal. Precise. “Are you back in Miami?"
“Sí.”
"Come now. I need to talk to you."
My heart hammers, thoughts running a mile a minute before I manage to answer with a simple, "I'll be there in fifteen."
He hangs up.
I stand there a second, phone still to my ear like more is coming. Nothing does. Fine. Action helps. I grab my wallet, my keys, the small velvet box that’s been living in my pocket for months now because I like knowing it’s on me—my mother’s ring.
The drive across the city is muscle memory by now. Summer makes Miami glow too bright, like the sun turned everything up a notch.
I pull up to the gate, tapping a code I should have forgotten years ago but never did. The iron rolls back, slow and torturous.
Inside, the house looks the same as always—squared hedges, immaculate stucco, He opens the door before I knock twice. He's in his usual attire, a pressed navy shirt, sleeves rolled once, and black trousers. For him, this is casual.
“Alejandro,” he says. “This way.”
The study feels like a courtroom with softer chairs. Light across the wide desk. There's a small mahogany box I haven’t seen before sitting in the center. He takes a seat and gestures for me to do the same.
For the first time in all of these years, I'm sitting in his study, almost as if he's seeing me as his equal and not just the gardener’s son.
There's silence at first. My pulse beats in my throat, but I keep my shoulders loose… or try to, anyway.
“You have been… consistent,” he says finally, selecting the word like he auditioned five others and found this one cleanest. “Church. Lunch. Calls on the road.”
“Sí, senor.”
His eyes stay steady. “And you've encouraged Beatriz to speak up for herself.”
“She’s always had the words,” I say. “I just make sure they have room.”
Something almost moves in his face and then doesn’t. He folds his hands. Opens them. Folds them again. “I want to ask you one question.” His voice dips, not soft, but lower. “Humor me. No speeches. Just tell me what you believe.”
I nod once. “Ask.”
He taps once on the desk with his index finger. “When the quiet comes—after the celebration, after the games, after the guests leave—and you and Beatriz disagree about something that matters, what do you do? Not your words—your actions.”
I don’t let the pause stretch. “I stop trying to win,” I say.
“I try to understand. I ask her to tell me where it hurts and what she needs to feel safe again. And I say what I need without making it a weapon. Then I make it right—whatever right looks like that day. If that means I apologize, I apologize. If it means I shut up and listen until I hear it the way she feels it, I do that. If it means I change the plan, I change the plan.” I hold his gaze.
“And if the quiet asks for patience, I give it. Because she matters more than being right.”
He stares like he’s testing the words for cracks. “And if you fail?” he asks, almost idly. “If pride bites first?”
“Then I own it,” I say. “Apologize. Try again.”
He nods once, and the room shifts a fraction, like air pressure easing from a blood pressure cuff. He reaches for the mahogany box and slides it toward me. His fingertips rest on the lid a heartbeat longer, then move away.
“Open it.”
The hinge whispers. Yellow gold catches the window light. The band is slender, the stone clear and clean, an elegant oval.
“It was her mother’s,” he says, and when he says mother, a small, human scrape catches in his voice. “She would have wanted Beatriz to have it.”
I don’t touch it. Not yet. It feels like a threshold, and I’m not stepping sloppy.
He leans back. The chair clicks. “Alejandro,” he says, and my name comes out less like a test and more like something he expects to keep using.
“I won’t rewrite the past. I won’t pretend I didn’t judge you harshly, or that I didn’t say things I regret.
” He inhales, exhales, clearing something out of his voice or maybe his mind.
“But I have been… watching.” He lets the word land. “And I am not blind.”
My chest goes tight. “You care for my daughter,” he says. “Without… conditions.” He tilts his chin toward the box. “Take it.”
I slide the ring free. It’s cool against my skin, light and immense at the same time. I study it a moment longer before carefully sliding it back into the box. I close the lid and ease it into my inner jacket pocket, right above my heart. The spot feels anchored now, not heavy.
“When will you do it?” he asks.
“This summer,” I say, the plan that’s been living in pencil finally committing to reality. “At a game. She’ll be traveling with us. I want you and Andrea to see it live, even if it’s from the couch.”
The corner of his mouth does something reluctant. “She will complain about her hair.”
“I’ll bring her a hat,” I say, and the joke lands enough to make the air feel less formal.
He stands. I stand. We don’t shake hands. Not yet. He studies me another second and then gives me a nod that isn’t small. “Be good to her.”
“Siempre,” I answer, steady. “With everything I have.”
He walks me to the door. Stops me with my name. “After,” he says, not an order, not a threat—an invitation disguised as a fact. “Bring her home.”
“Sí,” I say. “After.”
Sun hits me like a blessing when I step outside.
I don’t rush to the car. I let the front steps hold me one moment longer, my thumb pressing for a second against the pocket where her mother’s ring sits, and my mother’s ring rests in the jeans pocket I’ve worried smooth these last months.
Two circles of women who taught us how to love—one who raised her, one who should have raised me.
It does something to me I don’t have words for in either language.
The engine hums alive and I pull back onto the street. This city opens in color when you let it. Coral Gables blushes under its trees.
I pass Books & Books and remember the afternoon Bee was sprawled on a bench outside with a stack of paperbacks, reading the first page of each, nose scrunching for the ones that she disliked on page one.
She tossed one into my lap and said, “Try this. It holds you right away,” then leaned against me like she’d been leaning there forever.
I cut through Little Havana on purpose. Azucar is crowded even on a weekday, because Miami doesn’t need a reason for ice cream.
I see us at fifteen, elbows sticky, laughing at the abuela who told me to feed Beatriz more or she’d trade me for a boy who could.
Bee’s cheeks turned the color of guava. She still licks the drip off the cone with the same concentration.
I swing closer to South Pointe and the water flashes that impossible blue.
There we are at seventeen, sitting on the rocks with our shoes off, wind lifting her hair as she says I love you for the first time, like it’s simple and not the most extraordinary sentence I’ve ever heard.
I didn’t say it back fast enough because the feeling hit me so hard I forgot how words worked.
She laughed and pressed her mouth to mine until everything started again.
Passing Marlins Park, I remember a parking lot kiss that derailed a study session so completely, we failed and didn’t care.
In Coconut Grove, banyans lace the sky, and I see the night I asked her out the first time—voice too calm for the way my pulse went wild, hands damp, her smile, and a yes before I even finished the question.
This city is ours like that. Not because we own it. Because we lived in it well enough for it to live in us.
I steer toward South Pointe again, toward the spot where I dropped her off this morning. There’s a breeze that thinks it’s a relief, but it's still just more hot air. I text Andrea “Outside in five,” so she can pass it along. No reply. That’s fine. They’re together.