Chapter 29 #2
I turn in my chair and angle my head so the overhead lights blur. If I look directly at anything, I’m afraid something inside me will split.
“There’s something between the two of you. you two. Puedo verlo.”
“Fue un acuerdo mutuamente beneficioso,” I say, fingers digging into the edge of my desk. “It wasn’t… it isn’t a real relationship.”
“Not even a small part of it is real?”
The memory slams into me so hard I have to lay my palm flat on the desk. The car. The quiet. His voice when he asked if it had been real. The way I handed him a half-truth and then hid behind it.
“Mamá, por favor,” I whisper.
“Vi cómo lo mirabas. You looked so much like you did before your heart was broken.”
“My heart didn’t get broken,” I snap, too fast. “I made a mistake and trusted the wrong person. I was young. But I know better now.”
But I can feel that old memory rise anyway, the one I treat like it’s something shameful, when really it carved its name into everything I am.
“I worked harder than anyone else in that internship,” I say, the words coming out flat. “It was supposed to change my life.”
“Alycia,” she murmurs.
“I had a project for a community initiative that they had been trying to launch for years. I stayed up for weeks refining it. I gave it to my supervisor for feedback. He said it had potential, but it needed his guidance.”
Guidance. The word still tastes sour on my lips.
“He wanted after-hours meetings. To go over revisions.” My mouth twists around the word. “When I said no, everything shifted. He didn’t accuse me of anything outright. That would’ve been too obvious. He just… implied enough.”
My hand shakes, and I flatten it against the desk again.
“He told HR I seemed overwhelmed and too emotionally attached to the project. That he was worried I didn’t understand professional boundaries.
” I swallow hard. “By the time I realized what he’d done, the story was already in place.
I was too inexperienced. Too intense. Too ambitious.
Too much. And then he walked into a boardroom and presented my project without me. ”
I can still hear the applause through the door. I can still feel what it was like to stand on the wrong side of the glass while something I built was handed to someone else.
“He got promoted,” I say quietly, “and I got… pushed out.”
They called it a resignation. A mercy. But it felt like being erased.
“After that, every job I applied for had already heard something. Interviewers looked at me like I was a complication. One misunderstanding away from another problem. I had to start over from nothing.”
I try to sit straighter, but my skin feels too tight.
“I just wanted to prove myself,” I whisper. “Instead, I learned how easy it is for someone to take everything from you if you give them even one inch of trust.”
On the other end of the line, my mother is quiet. The silence fills with all the things I have never said out loud.
“Ay, mi nina… you didn’t deserve that.” Her voice cracks slightly, but she continues. “And now you’ve built the walls around your heart to protect yourself. But that was long time ago.”
“Not for me,” I breathe. “Not when one wrong feeling, one wrong moment, one wrong man could cost me everything again.”
“That isn’t what love does,” she whispers.
“El amor no te destruye, mija… it takes care of you.”
Maybe what happened back then wasn’t love at all.
Just power wrapped in opportunity. Someone waiting until I let myself believe I belonged, then pulling the rug out from under me.
It wasn’t a romantic heartbreak, but it still broke something.
It taught me that wanting anything in a world built on perception is dangerous. That softness is a liability.
“I can’t afford to lose another future because I let someone get too close,” I say.
She inhales, choosing her words. My mother has never been careless with this kind of thing. “Protecting your future shouldn’t mean sacrificing your present or your heart.”
“Mamá, estoy bien.” I swallow around the lump in my throat.
“Tienes miedo. Eso no es lo mismo que estar bien.”
“I’m not scared.”
The lie falls from my lips like I’ve been practicing it for years.
“If you say so,” she murmurs. “All I ask is that you don’t walk away from a chance to be happy because you’re afraid.”
“There’s nothing to walk away from because it wasn’t real.”
“Mija… sometimes pretending for too long starts to feel like what you wanted most.”
My throat feels like someone has a hand around it. She is too close to the truth I can barely look at.
“I really have to get back to work.”
Her voice softens again. “Call if you need me.”
I won’t. “I will.”
All the emotion I’ve kept bottled inside for months climbs, slow and merciless, until holding myself together feels like trying to grip water.
One more breath and everything inside me splits.
A broken sound tears out of me. I slap a hand over my mouth, but it is useless.
My body folds forward, curling around the pain like I am bracing for a hit I can’t dodge.
Tears splatter on the desk in sharp, humiliating drops.
“Not here,” I choke out, my shoulders shaking. “Please… not here.”
But there’s no stopping it. Not after everything I have refused to feel. The sobs come in waves. The memory of losing everything once and the terror of doing it again. I hate how quickly I fall apart. I hate that Kyle is the reason, even though he’s the only person who never meant to hurt me.
“Get it together,” I whisper, my voice cracking under its own weight. “Alycia, please. Get it together.”
But I can’t with the ache tearing through every place I tried to protect.
I reach for my computer like a lifeline I don’t deserve. The screen lights up, and his name flashes back at me, punching straight through whatever fragile hope I’ve been trying to kill. His last words echo through my mind, and something in me splinters all over again.
I could run down to the locker room and tell him the truth that’s been clawing at my ribcage since the gala.
I could need him, but wanting him feels like stepping back into a fire I barely escaped the last time.
Not because he reminds me of the man who stole my work and shattered my future, but because risking my heart again carries the same stakes.
If I choose wrong, it won’t just hurt. It will ruin me. A breath stutters out of me, sharp and furious and defeated all at once. Tears fall again, unstoppable, splashing onto the one life I built by never letting anyone close enough to knock it down.
“You wanted control,” I whisper, voice wrecked beyond recognition. “He is what it costs.”