On the Same Page

Chapter 1

The constant noise of traffic on the street seeps into the nearly empty room and echoes off the bare walls, as if the house still doesn’t quite know how to welcome life inside.

For a moment, Rebeca Noriega stands still, her hands resting on the loosely closed lid of one of the moving boxes, surveying the space that is now, in a way, entirely hers.

Beyond, among the nearby buildings along the Cantabrian coast, she can make out an irregular strip of sea. It isn’t a spectacular view, but the muted glint of the water is enough to remind her that Santander has welcomed her with open arms.

Rebeca lets out a sigh. She’s been carrying boxes upstairs for hours, organizing books, trying to transform that anonymous apartment into something that resembles a home.

The kitchen already has the essentials: a coffee maker, a set of dishes, and the smell of fresh coffee that still lingers in the air after she’s had her third cup of the morning.

The desk is positioned next to the living room window, exactly as she had imagined when she signed the lease.

On it rests her laptop, still closed, waiting to become the center of her daily routine once everything else is in order.

She walks slowly through the living room, running her hand over the back of the sofa that arrived that very morning with the moving company.

The white walls, the wooden floors, the sense of silence enveloping the entire building…

It’s exactly what she was looking for. A place where no one knows her.

A place to work without the past knocking on the door.

A place to start over without having to explain why she needs to.

For the past few years, she has lived in a sort of permanent limbo.

They haven’t been chaotic years, of course, or at least not on the surface.

She’s had major assignments, demanding translations, contracts that many people would have considered enviable.

Major publishers, well-known authors… Rebeca’s career has never stopped.

But her life has. She has spent too much time moving from one place to another, renting apartments, settling in with the promise that it would only be temporary.

Madrid, Barcelona, a brief stint in Lisbon working for a Portuguese publishing house.

Always with the same sense of impermanence, as if staying were more dangerous than leaving.

Until now.

The permanent contract with the international publishing house arrived just three months ago, an opportunity she’d been waiting for years.

Remote work, ongoing projects, geographical freedom.

And, almost at the same time, the offer to collaborate with a small local publisher in Santander.

The idea came up suddenly, almost by chance.

A quiet city. Near the sea. Far from everything she’d been avoiding over the last few years.

Rebeca opens one of the boxes that are still sealed and begins to take out the books inside.

They are novels in various languages, underlined essays, specialized dictionaries.

She places them on the living room bookshelf, and little by little, each volume that finds its place feels like a small act of control over the chaos she feels growing in her chest.

As she does so, she tries to convince herself that she has made the right decision.

“A new beginning.”

The phrase makes her feel slightly uncomfortable.

She has never been particularly fond of grandiose phrases.

Life rarely reorganizes itself as neatly as the novels she has translated suggest. But even so…

maybe here she can breathe. Maybe here she’ll manage to stop thinking about her disastrous personal life.

Maybe the sea holds some truth in its promise of distance.

She closes another box and sits up slowly, bringing a hand to the back of her neck to relieve the tension. At that moment, the building reminds her once again how quiet it is. Barely any footsteps can be heard on the upper floors, and for the first time, she feels a great sense of relief.

She’s about to head toward the kitchen when she hears a noise on the landing, just enough to catch her attention.

“Well, there are my neighbors…” she murmurs to herself. “Maybe I should go say hello.”

Rebeca walks toward the entrance, and when she opens the door, she does so carefully, as if she were afraid of encountering the most dangerous ogre in the forest.

But what she sees is even worse.

The woman standing in front of the door to the adjacent apartment has frozen in place, the key still in her fingers. For a long, surreal moment, neither of them is able to move.

“Don’t mess with me.”

Rebeca feels the cold seep through her chest. Martina Valcárcel’s features haven’t changed as much as she would have imagined.

Her dark hair still falls over her shoulders with that natural dishevelment that always seemed deliberate, and her blue eyes remain intense even from a distance.

It’s been six years since they last saw each other.

Six years.

Six years that vanish in an instant between them.

“Rebeca?” Martina’s voice breaks the silence with a disbelief she makes no attempt to hide. It’s deeper than she remembered, with that slight hoarseness that always appeared when she was nervous or surprised.

It takes a few seconds for reality to settle in Rebeca’s mind, and the images overlap with a silent intensity. Memories, conversations, glances. The taste of her lips. The warmth of her skin beneath the sheets. The way her name sounded on her lips…

Martina continues to watch her, as if she needs to confirm that what she has before her is real.

“What are you doing here?” she asks, and the question hangs between them with a naturalness that contrasts with the chaos beginning to grow inside Rebeca.

Rebeca tries to speak, but the words won’t come.

Her throat feels dry, and her pulse is pounding in her temples.

Martina glances slightly toward the interior of Rebeca’s apartment.

The half-open door reveals several boxes stacked in the living room, the desk recently placed next to the window, the inevitable clutter of a recent move.

Her expression shifts ever so slightly.

“So you’re our new neighbor…” Martina adds, and the word “our” hangs suspended in Rebeca’s clouded mind. “When did you arrive?” she asks, as if this were the most normal conversation in the world.

Rebeca swallows hard. The closeness is unbearable. She can smell the perfume she’s always worn, now mingled with the salty air of the bay.

“Well… a few hours ago,” Rebeca manages to reply.

Martina nods slowly. Her fingers play with the key, twirling it nervously between her fingers.

“What a coincidence…” Martina breaks off and shakes her head. “Of all the apartments in Santander, you had to end up in this one…”

“Of all the cities in Spain, and I go and choose this one. Damn it.”

Rebeca feels a knot in her stomach. Right now she wants to yell at her about how things turned out. But above all, her mind imagines her crossing the few steps that separate them to see if her mouth still tastes the same.

“I didn’t know you lived here,” she says instead. And Rebeca shakes her head mentally. “I didn’t even know you were still in Spain.”

Martina lets out a laugh.

“Well, there you go. Life has a pretty twisted sense of humor.” She takes a step toward her, and Rebeca instinctively steps back, bumping into her own doorframe. “Are you alone? I mean… did you come here alone?”

The question implies too many things. Rebeca feels the heat rising to her neck.

“Yes.”

Something shifts in Martina’s expression. A fleeting sense of relief that she tries to hide by looking down. When she looks up again, her eyes lock onto Rebeca’s with that intensity that always left her speechless.

“Listen… I don’t want this to be awkward. We’re adults. We can… I don’t know, say hi when we run into each other on the landing. Grab a coffee sometime, if you feel like it. For old times’ sake.”

“Old times.” The words pierce Rebeca with excruciating pain.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Martina tilts her head slightly.

“Are you still mad?” she dares to ask. “After six years…”

“I’m not angry,” Rebeca lies. “I just… don’t want any complications.”

“Right, complications,” Martina repeats, and her mouth curves into a bitter smile. “You were always an expert at avoiding them. Until you stopped avoiding me.”

Rebeca feels as if she can’t breathe.

“I’m not having this conversation on the landing,” Rebeca mutters, her hand already pushing against the door.

“Wait,” Martina says quickly, reaching out as if to hold her back. Her fingers barely brush the edge of the door, and that slightest touch is enough to send a shiver down Rebeca’s arm. “Rebeca, please…”

But Rebeca reacts first. The urge to escape comes on so suddenly that she barely has time to process it, and she quickly slams the door shut.

Her breathing has become irregular. Her heart is beating too fast, pounding against her ribs. She leans her back against the door, closing her eyes, trying to sort out the thoughts colliding with one another inside her head.

“Martina is here. In the apartment next door.”

The past that had been haunting her for so long has just appeared on the other side of a wall, more alive and dangerous than ever.

Rebeca steps away from the door and reaches into her pants pocket for her phone. Her fingers tremble slightly as she taps the screen to find her best friend’s contact.

The ringtone sounds twice before Bruno answers.

“If you’re calling to tell me you’ve already organized the bookshelves alphabetically, let me remind you that it’s still too early to obsess over details,” he says teasingly.

He almost makes her smile.

Rebeca runs a hand over her face, trying to calm down.

“I think I just made the biggest mistake of my life.”

There’s a brief silence on the other end.

“Funny,” Bruno replies. “I could swear that two days ago you told me moving to Santander was the best decision.”

Rebeca slumps down on the edge of the sofa. For a moment she looks around the living room, as if the apartment that just a few minutes ago seemed like a quiet promise had changed shape without her noticing.

“I just ran into Martina.”

This time the silence on the other end of the line is longer.

“Martina?” Bruno repeats, taking a few seconds to react. “Wait… which Martina?”

Rebeca closes her eyes.

“That Martina.”

She hears him exhale slowly, almost whistling.

“It can’t be.”

“Well, as you can see, it turns out she lives here.”

“In Santander?”

“In the apartment next door, to be exact.”

For a few seconds, neither of them says a word.

“Okay,” Bruno adds. Rebeca knows he’s just panicking. “Let’s sort this out. Have you talked to her?”

Even worse. The memory of her gaze on the landing comes flooding back with such clarity that she has to take a deep breath.

“Yes.”

“And?”

Rebeca looks down at her feet.

“She asked me what I was doing here. And then… she said I’m ‘our new neighbor.’ Ours, Bruno. She lives with someone.”

A small sigh is heard on the other end.

“That sounds pretty reasonable too; it’s been a long time.”

Rebeca slumps onto the couch, trying to steady her breathing.

“This was a really bad idea…”

“Rebeca, you just got here. You’re tired, you’ve been moving boxes all day, and your brain is trying to process something you didn’t expect. Tomorrow you’ll see things differently. Or the day after. Or when you stop shaking,” Bruno assures her. “One of those three has to work.”

She stares at the apartment door, as if she could see through the wood. She imagines Martina on the other side, perhaps leaning against her own door as well, her heart beating as hard as hers. She imagines her lips parted, her breath ragged, that old desire between them awakening against her will.

“No,” she murmurs. “What my brain is trying to process is that the reason for my constant new beginnings lives on the other side of that wall. And that everything I thought I’d left behind has just moved in with me.”