11 - LARA
The night grows darker outside the office window. I want to laugh again just thinking about this place, these people. Unbelievable. The universe must be messing with me.
I’m slumped in an armchair I never imagined would belong to this house. To this family. Family... I want to laugh again.
I drank too much. Definitely overdid it. I think I licked one of my brothers’ faces. My God! Did I? Laughter bursts out of me. I double over. My stomach actually hurts. Pain... Then I start crying. A bizarre mix of laughter and tears. The brownish floorboards blur.
I hear the door open. Great, an audience.
I see a man’s shoes approaching. Slow. Careful.
He crouches down. His hand cups my jaw, my chin, lifting my face toward his. Natanael’s expression is pained.
“I don’t need your pity,” I mumble, pulling my face away, shaking off his hand.
“Of course not.” His mouth is a thin line of... pity. Pure and simple. “That was your role. To feel sorry for us.” He takes my hand. “I thought it was great you showed up, but now you know what goes on here. And Lara, in this whole theater, you don’t have a part.”
My mind whispers: I do have one. I’m the secret mistress. Then it screams at me: so stupid, you didn’t even know it until now. So stupid, you couldn’t hold it together.
I hear a clinking in the yard. His voice on the microphone. He apologizes to those still there, says the party continues. Her voice. More apologies. The sound of a kiss.
Nat gently wipes a tear from my cheek.
“I brought your backpack. Come on, I’ll take you to the airport.”
Silence fills my brother’s car. I watch the little town fade behind us. Once again. The road rushing toward me.
I get out of the car. Natanael walks with me.
“You don’t need to buy the ticket,” he tells me. “Check your phone.”
There’s a link. They even bought my ticket so I’d never come back. Wow!
“Last time, you all begged me to stay, to give up college. I left in the middle of the night. Now... you’re kicking me out.” I let out a weak laugh. “Nice.”
“Lara.” He steps closer, his tone gentle. “Envy never suited you.”
“Envy?”
“Look, when I told them how well you were doing in S?o Paulo, Laura changed. Envy beat out the addiction. It suits her.” He smiles humorlessly.
“She asked Nic for money, went out buying designer clothes, redid the house, put everyone in classes. She and Nicolas set up the whole scheme. I already told you about him. I could have stopped it, but I thought it would be good for her. For everyone. Our sister started getting close to rich, influential people, until she showed up with this millionaire jerk, totally in love with her. Mom jumped on the crazy train. All of us did. It was fun.” He shrugs.
“Me, married to Tati, I stopped caring. Tati had fun too, I liked that. I just don’t love her using Nic’s money, sometimes getting too close to Veruska, but that’s our life.
Not yours.” He wraps me in a tender hug—one that I think he’s given me once in his life, when he was high.
“I love you, little sis. You were never like this. Go back and be yourself again, there in the capital.” He pulls away, smiling at me.
“Don’t come near us anymore. You’re better than this, you know that. You always were. You always knew.”
“Please tell me I didn’t lick your face.”
Nat bursts out laughing.
“If you don’t remember everything you did, better to leave it that way.” He pinches the tip of my nose. “But you showed you really do have Borbón blood running through your veins.”
I grumble, annoyed.
I walk into my apartment, and again I want to burn everything.
I’m so tired I’ll leave it for another day.
I fall onto the bed. Fog envelops me. I see Nicolas smiling, deadly.
He gets closer and closer. He crouches, his knee on my mattress.
His eyes so close to my face as I lie there.
Am I dead? I feel like I am. His tongue slides out. The wetness on my cheek.
I wake up to Bront? licking me. I smile at her as she curls up against me. I hug her. I missed you so much!
“You’re my safe harbor, you know that?” I lift her up high, giving her an Eskimo kiss. “Yes you are, yes you are.” I get up and point at Heathcliff. “No jealousy, okay? You are too.”
I finish my shower and walk out to find Bárbara, Priscila, and a lavish breakfast spread in the kitchen.
I run to hug them. I cry. Soon all three of us are crying.
When the sob-fest ends, we eat and I tell them almost everything.
We go over the wedding invitation—my mother is an expert at deceiving people and getting what she wants.
We piece together parts of the puzzle. I lament my misfortune.
I don’t tell them about the week we spent in this apartment.
Pri apologizes for insisting we go out that night. So much could have been avoided. They exchange that look—the one that always makes me think: okay, they’ll tell me what it is soon. The thing is, it’s been weeks.
“Okay, you can tell me what’s going on,” I demand. “I’m tired of waiting for an explanation for those looks you two keep giving each other.”
They clearly dodge the question. They trash-talk my family and Adam’s. We chat for a while. Until Bárbara drops the bomb.
“I’ve been texting with Olavo.”
Priscila and I stare at her, stunned. We both start talking at once, bombarding our friend in an all-out counterattack. We wear ourselves out, catch our breath, and keep going.
“Stop, I can’t understand a thing!” Bárbara shouts. We don’t stop. “I’m in love with him.”
That stops us.
“What do you mean, Barbs?”
“I’m sorry, Lara… I saw you suffering, thinking about Adam… I said I had Olavo’s number…”
“Yeah, but not that you were in contact with him.”
“We traveled together,” she admits awkwardly.
“Wait, that work trip…” Pri puts it together.
Of course—it was one of the rare times she barely talked to us. Same here.
“Yes, we visited some islands in the Bahamas. It was incredible.”
“Oh, who wouldn’t fall in love like that, right, Barbs?” Pri rolls her eyes. “You know he’s a millionaire and that’s just a walk in the park for him. Get real!”
“Hey, don’t put her down like that,” I say, feeling like the shoe fits me too.
“Let her, Lara. She’s right.” Bárbara swallows hard, shrinking into herself.
“My bad, girl. I just don’t want you to get your hopes up, because…”
“Like me,” I interrupt, and tell them about my week with Adam.
I didn’t promise him a thing. I don’t owe him a thing. So I tell them. I tell them everything, including the envelope with money, which must be nothing to him—as Pri rightly pointed out to Bárbara, it was a walk in the park.
The two of them are gaping at me. I finish with a warning for Bárbara—after all, sooner or later, she might run into the jerk. Although it’s pretty unlikely; in all these years they’ve never shown their faces, always keeping a low profile, protecting the family. Oh, God! I feel like throwing up.
“Look, you’re going to forget about these losers, these jerks, these pieces of shit, understand?”
“Relax, Pri, he already dumped me anyway,” Barbs explains. “He called and told me what happened at the engagement party and said we shouldn’t see each other anymore. He’d invited me to his friend’s wedding—I had no idea it was to your sister, Lara.”
“Even though he thought we…?” Priscila suddenly stops.
“You know what, let’s forget this whole lot, okay?
! And if anything, sue them! I know excellent lawyers.
Let’s move on with our wonderful lives. We’re more than enough on our own to keep moving forward and, if we want, with someone by our side someday. ”
“You have Xande,” I point out. “And you’re absolutely right.” I stand up, pulling them with me. “All of this stays in the past. Let’s look to the future while appreciating the present.”
It was easy to say those words, hard to move forward unscathed. The wounds left marks. Marks and memories all over my home. More than any other guy who’d ever been in my life.
Adam had become a living memory inside me.
Everything started to irritate me. The days themselves.
Just for existing, they irritated me. I wanted to strangle every dawn.
I’d become pure stress. I’m not proud, but not even melatonin worked—I started taking sleeping pills.
He was changing me more than I wanted. It was so much misery that when that Saturday arrived…
That afternoon, Pri and Barbs come into the house with a beautiful box.
“A present?” I swear I want to smile. I think I manage to pull my lips up a little. It must be convincing.
“Yes, for your closure,” Bárbara says, all smiles.
“And for yours too,” Priscila explains. “We’re going to the wedding.”
I almost fall over backward.
The crazy girls’ idea is for Bárbara and me to see the two of them so we can finally put an end to it.
My friend opens up, reveals she’s been distracted, making silly mistakes at work—the other day she even forgot to lock her apartment door.
Priscila shares more examples, pointing at me too, with several of the same symptoms. She goes to my room and comes back shaking the little bottle of sleeping pills.
She says I won’t need them anymore. Throws them in the trash.
“It doesn’t help to repeat every morning that you’re capable and that you’ll get over it if you keep thinking about what happened.
” Pri holds my shoulders. “The three of us will go and you’ll show your family the incredible Lara you’ve become—that you’re not envious, that on the contrary, you have a lot to be proud of.
All of us do. I’m going as moral support and to make sure you don’t give in. ”
“Guys, the wedding is in a few hours,” I state the obvious. “We’re not going. Even if there was time. We wouldn’t go. It’s crazy.”
Have I mentioned I’m easily convinced by my sister-friends? Well, truth be told, it’s Priscila who always convinces us of what she believes is right. Honestly, I think I really need this. This closure. This reality cruelly thrown in my face.