Chapter 2
Miley
“Getting rid of a man is officially harder than marrying one.”
My sister’s voice came through the phone, dry and exhausted.
I had her on speaker while I kneaded dough at my new restaurant, Sazón’s prep station.
My hands were buried in flour up to my wrists.
Boyz II Men played low on the dining room speakers because Rosa once said nineties R&B makes the food taste better, and I wasn’t about to argue with a woman who’d been cooking longer than I’d been breathing.
“That bad?” I asked.
“His family hired a third attorney, because apparently two wasn’t enough to make my life miserable.
They needed a whole legal squad.” Vicky exhaled, and I heard the sound of her dropping onto something, probably her couch, the one with the broken spring she kept saying she’d fix.
“His lawyer actually argued in front of the judge that I don’t provide a ‘structured enough environment’ for Eloise.
Structured. Like I’m running a prison instead of raising a five-year-old. ”
“What does ‘structured’ even mean?” I asked.
“It means his family has money and mine doesn’t. That’s what it means.”
I pressed the dough harder than necessary. My sister’s ex-husband, Greg, could charm any room he walked into and make you believe his smile was genuine. Right up until you lived with him and realized the charm was a costume he took off the second the front door closed.
He hadn’t been violent, fortunately. He’d been something quieter, and in some ways worse: controlling, dismissive, capable of making you feel crazy for having feelings and then telling everyone you were unstable when you finally snapped.
Vicky filed for divorce eleven months ago, and Greg’s wealthy family had responded by turning the custody battle into a war meant to wear her down, slowly bleeding her dry while she tried to keep a roof over her daughter’s head.
A small, bright voice piped up in the background. “Mommy, is that Auntie Miley?”
Eloise’s voice made my heart ache. That little girl was only five years old, obsessed with princess stickers and the color yellow. Sometimes she asked questions none of us knew how to answer—like why Daddy lived in a different house now.
“Tell her I’m making her a cake,” I said loudly enough for Eloise to hear.
Vicky put me on speaker. Eloise’s voice filled the kitchen. “Does it have sprinkles?”
“All the sprinkles. Every sprinkle that exists.”
“Even the rainbow ones?” She giggled softly.
“Especially the rainbow ones.”
“Okay, good.” She was quiet for a second. “Auntie Miley, can I also have a puppy?”
“That’s a Mommy question, baby.”
“Mommy said ask Auntie Miley!”
Vicky got back on the line, voice lower now. Eloise had wandered off to her room, probably to negotiate a puppy deal with her stuffed animals. “Sorry. She’s been on a puppy campaign for three weeks. She made a presentation. With drawings.”
I couldn't help laughing. “She’s five.”
“She’s persuasive. I blame you.”
I smiled, but it didn’t hold. Vicky’s voice had changed.
The humor was still there, surface-level, because Vicky and I had both learned young that if you didn’t laugh, you drowned.
But underneath it was the sound of a woman standing on the last floor of a building that was burning from the bottom up.
“Vic,” I said, gentler now. “How bad is it really?”
She went silent. Longer than I liked.
“The restaurant investment is the only income I can point to in court. If Sazón doesn’t work…
” She trailed off. She didn’t need to finish.
I heard the rest in the silence. If Sazón didn’t work, Greg’s lawyers would use her financial instability as a weapon.
The restaurant wasn’t just my dream. It was Vicky’s lifeline.
It was the only thing standing between my sister and losing her daughter.
“Sazón is going to work,” I said. “It’s already working.”
“I know. I know it is.” She cleared her throat. “I’m fine. Really. I just need to get through the next hearing without his mother looking at me like I’m something she found on the bottom of her shoe.”
“If she looks at you like that again, I’ll put hot sauce in her tea.”
Vicky laughed. “Torres sisters never sink, right?”
“Yes, Torres sisters never sink.” I repeated it the way we always did, the way we’d been saying it to each other since we were kids sharing a room in Aunt Eliza’s house, whispering it like a prayer on the nights when Eliza’s coldness felt like it might swallow us whole. “We float. Even when the water’s ugly.”
“Even when the water’s ugly,” Vicky echoed.
“Okay. I gotta go. Eloise wants to FaceTime Aunt Eliza, and I need to supervise because last time Eliza told her that I was getting a ‘divorce’. Then Eloise asked me what ‘divorce’ meant and I had to explain it without using any of the words I actually wanted to use.”
I winced. Aunt Eliza. Even from a hospital bed recovering from a stroke, the woman managed to plant seeds of poison in a five-year-old’s vocabulary. Some talents are just God-given, I guess.
We hung up. I stood at the prep station with flour on my hands and Boyz II Men still going. The morning light drifted across the dining room floor, and I let myself breathe through it for exactly ten seconds before I packed it away and got back to work.
That’s what we did. The Torres sisters never sink. We made dough, opened restaurants, showed up, kept going, because the alternative was giving up, and giving up meant proving Aunt Eliza right. I’d eat glass before I gave that woman the satisfaction.
More importantly, I owed it to Vicky. She believed in me. She believed in my restaurant. The least I could do was help her through this. I’d do whatever I could to help her win this custody battle. I was the only person she could truly count on.
Our parents died before either of us could form lasting memories of them. Mom died during my birth, a fact Dad’s elder sister, Eliza, never let me forget. Whenever she visited us, she had a way of mentioning it at the worst possible moments, like it was a fun fact she couldn’t resist sharing.
“Your mother would still be alive if it wasn’t for you.
” She’d say it while passing the salt at dinner, or folding laundry, or standing in the doorway of our room at night like she’d come to deliver a bedtime story and chose that one instead.
Then Dad died in a car accident when I was four and Vicky was nine.
After that, we had to shift with Eliza permanently.
The only family willing to take in two orphaned girls, or at least, the only family willing to take the credit for it.
Eliza didn’t beat us, didn’t starve us. She fed us, clothed us, put a roof over our heads, but reminded us of the cost every single day.
We were charity cases in her house, two extra mouths she hadn’t planned for, and she made sure we understood the math of it.
Her biological daughter, Elspeth, got the piano lessons, the bedroom with the window, and the new school uniforms.
On the other hand, Vicky and I got hand-me-downs, a shared room at the back of the house, and the phrase “you should be grateful” delivered so often it might as well have been our middle names.
Vicky shielded me from the worst of it. She was only nine when she became my mother, my protector, my translator for a world that didn’t want us.
She’d crawl into my bed on the nights Eliza said something that cut too deep and whisper “Torres sisters never sink” into my hair until I fell asleep.
She was the one who taught me to cook, actually. Not Eliza.
Eliza assigned cooking as a chore, but Vicky turned it into something else. She’d stand beside me at the stove and say, “Taste this. What’s missing?” And I’d think about it, really think, and I’d add a pinch of something and Vicky would nod and say, “See? You’ve got the gift.”
But even Vicky was taken from me when Aunt Eliza sent her to a private boarding school.
I was left to survive public school and its bullies alone.
I was fifteen when I almost faded. Not in a way anyone could see. It was the quieter kind, where you find yourself sitting on a bathroom floor at night, and the world feels so heavy and so empty at the same time that you start wondering if anyone would notice if you just disappeared.
Then I found him.
It was an accident. I was scrolling through my phone with blurry eyes and a chest full of nothing, and I clicked on some random interview clip.
A twenty-year-old on a talk show. Dark hair, blue eyes, a charming face.
He was talking about growing up unwanted, and the host was trying to steer the conversation toward something lighter, but this stranger wouldn’t let her.
He looked straight at the camera and said, “You don’t have to earn the right to exist. You just do. ”
I played that clip six times. Seven. Eight.
Until my phone died and I had to plug it in and I was still sitting there on the cold tile watching him.
Something had shifted in me that day. A quiet beginning, but it was enough to give me a place to start.
Like someone had cracked a window in a room that had been sealed shut, and a thin ray of hope got through.
Christopher Vale.
That was his name. I watched his every interview after that.
Every film. Every press tour. He became the voice in my head on the bad nights, the proof that someone could come from nothing and still become something.
He probably had no idea he’d saved a little girl’s life from a bathroom floor in Miami.
Most people don’t know when they save someone. They just say the right thing at the right time and move on, never knowing the weight of what they left behind. The lives they might have saved.
I hadn’t thought about that bathroom floor in years. I didn’t need to anymore. I had Sazón. I had Vicky, Eloise, my bestie Anna, and a life I’d built with my own hands from ingredients nobody thought I could afford.