30. Amalia
Twenty-four hours have passed since Silas left, and as promised, I stayed in his apartment last night.
I had to invent an excuse for both that evening and the ones that follow so as not to raise suspicion with tío Felipe and Lupe, but my twin picked up immediately that something was off.
“Since when do you need to stay overnight to study?” she asks me now, and I genuinely feel guilty that I can’t tell her the truth.
Lupe would never judge me; she’d probably commission a statue in front of the house in honor of my act of rebellion, but I know she’d ask questions I still don’t have answers to.
Like whether he feels for me what I feel for him. Like how this is supposed to work going forward.
“Hey, you know you can tell me anything, right?” I don’t miss the thread of doubt in her tone.
“I know. And I promise we’ll talk at some point.”
She’s not convinced, but her phone buzzes with a message right then, almost certainly from Alek, judging by the way her face lights up. I take the opportunity to slip away to school.
I still have complicated feelings about Lupe’s boyfriend, especially since he asked me, some time ago, to delete footage of him coming to our house.
We don’t have many surveillance cameras around the neighborhood, but his explanation was that he’s an important businessman who naturally has enemies monitoring his movements.
To make his case, he even told us that a few weeks ago he was attacked when he was having dinner with an associate.
I had my doubts, but he showed us a graze from where the bullet just missed him, so I complied and deleted the evidence.
Ay Fermat help us all, I don’t like this.
Before I walk into the lecture hall, I see Professor Camila coming toward me with an odd expression.
“Amalia, I need you to come to my office for a moment.”
This is the first time she’s ever called me to her office, and it unsettles me, because I’m a model student. I submit everything on time, my project is developing really well, so I genuinely can’t imagine what I’ve done.
Her office is at the end of the hall, and the moment I step inside I take in the board covered in algorithms and functions, the white Victorian-style desk, the ergonomic chair with support cushions for the neck and lumbar, and an abundance of flowers. Tulips and roses in various colors.
I must be staring, because she clears her throat.
“I won’t keep you, Amalia, but I need an explanation.”
I frown at the phrasing, but before I’ve run through the possible scenarios, she pushes an envelope toward me. My heart starts beating too loudly because I have a feeling, and it isn’t a good one.
My fingers ease the photographs out of the envelope, and I nearly congratulate myself for not fainting at what’s in front of me.
Photos of me entering Silas’s building. Photos from a few days ago, at the café where we went together.
I know my eyes give me away, but I slide the images back into the envelope and straighten my spine.
“I don’t understand what the problem is,” I tell her, because there’s nothing incriminating visible in those photographs. “We’re two adults having coffee in the same place. I can explain why I stopped by his building?—”
“Amalia, in this case I’m choosing to treat your intelligence as your lifeline. Please don’t insult my judgment. What’s happening here is obvious enough, and even if it weren’t, these photographs are sufficient to cause a scandal.”
I watch the woman who has been my example, a mentor, radiate bitterness and something mean. At what point did she start caring whether Silas sees someone or not?
And then I see it.
The jealousy in her eyes. The way her entire body is rigid.
And I find myself wondering whether she was involved with Silas, whether there was ever something more between them, because I can’t justify the hate I sense coming from her.
But she’s right, it doesn’t matter that there’s nothing explicit in these photographs. They’re enough to generate gossip.
Gossip about Silas’s integrity. Gossip about how I earned my grades.
Nobody wants the truth when the lie is more interesting.
I don’t answer her. I have nothing to negotiate with, so I wait to see what she wants. There’s a reason these photographs are in front of me and not on the dean’s desk.
“You’ll transfer to the Technological Institute of Monterrey.
They have an exceptional program, and no one will know anything.
In exchange, Silas will continue teaching here, with no one seeing these photographs.
However respected he is, they would follow him to any university he tried to apply to afterward. ”
Every scenario and every possibility spins through my head, every lie I’d have to produce to make it possible, and I feel physically sick. I can taste something sour imagining Lupe’s face, and tío Felipe’s, when I have to find a reason to leave the city.
But this isn’t about me. It’s about Silas.
A brilliant man whose entire career would be called into question because of this relationship.
A relationship I’m equally responsible for.
Maybe if I hadn’t pushed, maybe if I’d held the distance a little longer.
Maybe I wouldn’t know what it feels like to be the center of his attention, and this whole scenario wouldn’t hurt this much.
I nod to show I’ve understood, and in the next moment she slides a transfer contract across the desk. My hand trembles as I sign my name on the dotted line, but something quiet settles inside me at the thought that I won’t cause any harm to the man I love.
Because in this moment, there is not a single trace of doubt in me about what I feel for him.
“When does the transfer take effect?” I ask, forcing myself to hold her gaze.
“Tomorrow.”
Twenty-four hours. I’ll have time to talk to him and find a way through this together.
It’s not a tragedy to be at another university.
There are breaks between semesters. But while I’m running through these thoughts, she says, ”You know, Amalia, it may not seem like it, but I’m protecting you right now.
You’re not yet twenty; you have your whole life ahead of you.
Trust me when I say you don’t want to associate yourself with a married man, who also happens to be your professor. ”
My mind catches on the word married, and I try to hide the shock. What do you mean married? Married, as in…he has a wife? All this time, he had a family somewhere else?
I feel my morning sandwich working its way back up as the image she’s planted takes shape in my mind.
Is that why he never mentions his family? Is that why he left in such a hurry…to be with her?
Ay Diosito, what have I done?
Every moment he avoided bringing up his family, every time I thought I caught a flash of guilt in his eyes, why didn’t I think harder about it?
Because you didn’t listen to reason, my mind whispers, and I have to swallow several times to keep from being sick right here.
“I take it you didn’t know. He has a wife in Pennsylvania and a nine-year-old boy.” Her hand pushes a piece of paper toward me, a birth certificate for a boy named Sebastian Vaughn. And in the father field: Silas Vaughn.
I feel as though thousands of needles are being pressed into my chest at once, and the knot in my throat becomes physically painful to swallow against.
With the last gram of strength I have left to keep from breaking down in front of her, I put a smile on my face and look at her.
“Thank you.”
I don’t hear whether she says anything else. I don’t know how many steps I took to reach the bus stop, or whether I checked the road before crossing.
Which is why I don’t notice the car parked in front of our house, or the unusual quiet, until Lupe comes toward me.
“Amalia, por fin. I need you to delete some surveillance footage.”
I’m still in shock, but I force the organ in my chest to stop making noise so I can hear my own brain.
“Footage? What’s the reason?” I ask, and that’s when my eyes find another pair of brown ones. He’s leaning against the kitchen counter.
“Amalia.” Alek’s voice fills the house, and I feel my uncle step in behind us.
“Alek, I didn’t know you were coming to visit.”
“I wanted to spend a little time with Lupe before my next trip.”
It’s the only explanation he offers, and my twin has hearts in place of eyes. Was I that obvious too? Was it that easy to see that the center of my world had shifted to him?
“Why do you need the footage deleted?”
He opens his jacket slightly and steps slowly toward us, as if not wanting to startle anyone.
My mood is sour, and something about him has always felt wrong to me, so I don’t lower my guard, no matter how intimidating his presence is.
“I’m an important man, Amalia. I wouldn’t want my enemies to put Lupe on their radar because of a few cameras that picked me up around the neighborhood.”
It makes logical sense, but there’s something underneath it, something he’s not telling us. When I look at my sister, though, I already know I’ll do it without asking more.
“It’ll take fifteen minutes,” I tell them and try to swallow the bitterness sitting on the tip of my tongue and in my chest.
I try to block the voices whispering in my head that they warned me, that someone like Silas Vaughn couldn’t possibly be drawn to me. The whispers saying I didn’t listen to reason, that I let my heart carry me away.
I work in silence until tío Felipe comes up behind me, his voice low. “Go with her, Amalia. I don’t like that man, and I have a bad feeling.”
I don’t have the strength to argue, don’t have the energy to explain why I’d prefer to lock myself in my room for at least a decade, so I just nod.
When all the footage is deleted and we’re ready to walk out the door, I catch the irritation on Alek’s face, which involuntarily puts a small smile on mine.
Before I leave the house, tío Felipe pulls me into a hug and says quietly, “Swallow that knot in your throat, mi ni?a, and keep your head up. He isn’t worth your worry, and he isn’t worth your heart.”
My eyes go wide immediately, but he only smiles gently. Somehow he knew. He knew that all those late nights away from home were spent with someone.
“How?” I murmur, embarrassed.
“You’ve been glowing these past few months in a way you never have before.”
“I was glowing for nothing,” I tell him, only half out loud, not looking at him.
Se?or Newton, couldn’t you make gravity swallow me whole right now?
I feel him take my hand, and then, without fully processing it, I look at him.
“Be good to yourself, mi ni?a.”
I don’t let him see the tears in my eyes. I don’t let him see how his words just moved something in the center of my chest, or how much I want to sit down on the floor and cry. Instead, I kiss his cheek and walk out of the house.