Chapter 21 #2
By the time I leave work, the sky is a deep, bruised blue.
My phone is at 9 percent. My brain is at 0 percent.
The drive home is muscle memory. My apartment greets me in practiced silence as I toe off my shoes, hang my coat, and set down my bag.
Each motion strips away another piece of armor until the ache underneath becomes impossible to ignore.
I tell myself I’ll make real food tonight.
Something with a vegetable, proof I can take care of myself in ways that don’t involve Google Calendar reminders.
Then I open the fridge and find nothing but a lone yogurt and half a lemon staring back at me from the middle shelf, surrounded by too much empty space.
Whatever good intentions I have dissolve on contact.
“Future me can worry about scurvy,” I mutter, and close the door before turning on the kettle, as if hot water counts as nourishment, then my phone rings.
I see the contact photo—my mother holding a pie like a trophy—and my chest tightens.
I consider letting it go to voicemail, but she’ll keep calling if I don’t answer. “Hi, Mom.”
Her voice is warm and bright and immediate, as if she’s been waiting all day to hear from me. “Ay, mi nina, am I catching you at a bad time? You must be drowning in work with this big gala coming.”
I try to smile, even though she can’t see it. “A little busy.”
“Well, you always handle it,” she says, pride ringing through every word. “They’re lucky to have you.”
My throat tightens, but I manage, “Thank you.”
“Are you ready?” she says, excitement blooming.
“Ready for what?”
“Alycia.” She laughs, light and teasing. “Por favor, attending the gala with your wonderful boyfriend, of course. It’s all over the TV! Why didn’t you tell me Kyle was a big-time hockey player?”
My breath stutters because for a minute, I forgot about everything. The cameras and the story that I crafted with surgical precision. A story she thinks is real because I let her meet him under false pretenses. I let myself pretend it was harmless.
“You… saw that?”
“Mija, everyone saw that,” she says, like it’s the cutest thing in the world. “My coworkers practically tackled me at lunch, asking if it was the same Kyle I met at dinner. When I said yes, they almost fainted! I told them I didn’t know he was famous… ay, dios mío, how could you hide that from me.”
“I didn’t hide anything.” Heat blooms beneath my skin, an impossible mix of guilt and embarrassment that makes it hard to breathe. “It just… never came up.”
“You should have brought it up. He was so polite, and he looked at you like—well.” She clears her throat as if editing herself. “I just didn’t realize he was Kyle Hendrix until the television told everyone.”
“I didn’t tell you because…” The truth stumbles on my tongue. “It’s not really like that.”
“Like what?” Her voice dips, turning careful. “You told me you had a boyfriend, carino. When I heard a man’s voice on the phone, I almost screamed with happiness because you had finally decided to let someone in.”
I close my eyes and let that night play behind my eyelids in vivid detail. The way I panicked when she asked, and how Kyle overheard everything and offered.
“It’s complicated,” I say, my voice shrinking around the edges.
She hears the shift immediately. “Mija... does he treat you well? No me mientas.”
Cutting straight through the noise to the one thing that has ever mattered to her—am I being cared for.
Not the headlines. Not the TV chatter. Not the fact that she apparently recognized him before I ever said his name out loud, just whether he treats me well.
And somehow, that makes the lie feel heavier.
“Yes,” I whisper. “He’s… good. Really good. It’s just… not what you think.”
“?De veras?” There’s a pause long enough for my pulse to climb into my throat. “Then tell me what’s wrong.”
What do I tell her? That it’s a role we agreed to play? A lie that started as a convenience and turned into something I don’t have language for? That the man she invited into her kitchen, the one who charmed her without trying, is only mine in a way that doesn’t belong to either of us?
“It’s work,” I finally say, the word scraping on its way out. “This thing between us it’s for the team’s optics. It’s not… romantic.”
“Ay, mija…” Her voice softens in a way that presses against every bruise I’ve been ignoring. “Sometimes beautiful things start in strange places. But more importantly, is your heart safe?”
“Sí,” I whisper, though my voice betrays me with the smallest crack. “Está bien, Mamá.”
“Fine isn’t the same as happiness. All I want…” Her voice wavers in that heartbreaking, motherish way. “Es que seas feliz, mija. Nothing else matters.”
The sentence lands like a stone dropped straight into the center of my chest, heavy enough to make something inside me tilt.
We talk a little longer about the neighbor’s cat that keeps wandering into her yard.
I make all the right noises at all the right moments, and somewhere between them, my chest feels like it’s filling with wet cement.
When we hang up, things don’t feel the same. Everything is still where it belongs, louder somehow despite the silence, but it feels like someone pressed a thumb into the softest part of my sternum and left it throbbing.
I stand there with the phone still in my hand, blinking at nothing.
My laptop sits on the coffee table, the screen reflecting a shadow of my face—blurred edges, tired eyes, a woman holding too much together with too little thread.
I walk over on autopilot, tap the trackpad.
The gala schedule blooms open in sharp lines and neat organized colors, everything I’m supposed to be.
I lower myself onto the couch, the cushion dipping under my weight as if even it knows I’m carrying too much. The cursor blinks at the top of the document like it’s waiting for me to re-enter the version of myself who can breathe inside spreadsheets and bullet points.
I scroll and stop on his name, like I do every single time. My chest tightens so abruptly it forces a breath out of me, and my mother’s voice echoes: You always do. They’re lucky to have you. Kyle’s voice follows, quieter but sharper: It doesn’t feel like work.
I press my fingertips into the trackpad until the plastic squeaks, just to feel something anchored. “Keep it professional.”
The words fall flat, feeling like a flimsy boundary drawn in pencil because professional doesn’t explain the electric shock of seeing him in the hallway today or the way he took one step toward me like he didn’t even realize he was doing it.
It doesn’t explain how my pulse stuttered in a way it hasn’t for anyone in years.
And it doesn’t explain why my mother’s assumption—her hopeful belief that I’d finally let someone in—hurt as much as it did.
I drop my head back against the couch and stare at the ceiling until the plaster blurs. I could stop this and tell the team the lie isn’t worth the fallout. That the boundary is bending too far. That my judgment is compromised. They’d believe me and move on, and I’d be safe again.
The thought lands wrong, like stepping into a room I used to live in and finding it too small now. I close the laptop, and the screen goes dark, my reflection staring back at me—shoulders stiff, eyes too bright. A woman who turned competence into armor and forgot how to take any of it off.
“I don’t think I can keep the lines from blurring.”
Who am I kidding? The line already feels smudged. I think about the way he looked at me earlier, the breath I didn’t let myself take, the way I wanted to lean into him instead of holding myself upright with both hands.
My chest squeezes because wanting is dangerous.
It gets you hurt, and it’s the one thing I’ve trained myself out of since the moment I learned that softness isn’t rewarded in rooms like this.
It’s exploited. I learned that hard lesson young, and I’ve spent every day since building walls that no one could twist into a weakness again.
I drop my hands into my lap, letting the quiet settle around me.
But it isn’t calm; it’s crowded. With the gala looming like a spotlight, I’m not ready to stand in it.
Not when I know exactly what happens when the wrong eyes decide a woman in this job is “too close” to someone she works with.
I’ve lived through that kind of suspicion once and barely survived the fallout.
My mother’s voice in my ear, hopeful in a way that makes my ribs ache.
And Kyle—God, Kyle—catching my eye in the hallway earlier, warm and searching, like I was something he wasn’t supposed to want but couldn’t look away from.
All of it presses just beneath my skin, simmering too close to the surface, impossible to shove back into the neat boxes I need it to stay in.
I reach for my phone and open our message thread, seeing the question I avoided answering.
Kyle
Are you okay?
I never actually answered him, at least not truthfully.
I turned it into something logistical and safe, like I always do.
But I haven’t stopped thinking about the question.
Now, with my thumb hovering over the keyboard, I could answer with something harmless, anything to make the ache go quiet for a moment.
But I don’t type anything. Instead, I lock the phone and place it face down on the coffee table, like I’m shutting a door I’m not strong enough to look through.
I curl my knees to my chest, arms wrapped tight, and drop my forehead into the space created by my own arms. I don’t cry, but the pressure behind my ribs feels like if I breathe too deeply, everything I’ve held together will spill out.
The gala is two days away. My mother thinks I’m walking in with a boyfriend.
The team thinks I’m unshakable. And Kyle thinks…
I don’t know what he thinks, but I know whatever it is, I’m afraid of it.
I’m perched on the sharpest edge I’ve ever put myself on. If I lean one way, I get the life I’ve built, but if I lean the other… I get him. Maybe. And that kind of heartbreak doesn’t heal cleanly.
In the dark behind my closed eyelids, I see him laughing on the ice, alive in a way that makes something in me unfurl, no matter how tightly I hold it.
I hear my mother’s voice: I just want you to be happy.
I hear myself lying: Everything is perfect.
And then I hear him, devastatingly unguarded: You’d look better in blue.
“I can’t afford to want this,” I whisper into the stillness, and my apartment doesn’t argue.
But somewhere under the fear and the rules and the exhaustion, a stubborn part of me whispers back: You already do.