“They are, Lina.” Sharon smiled. “And they have. I know people like Gerald often go unpunished; it’s how the world works sometimes. But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying to change that, does it? Doesn’t mean that we stop fighting.”
Her words reminded me of the ones someone had told me, begged me to believe, only a few days ago. Words that I had chosen to ignore.
“You can think about what I just told you. Okay? Take your time to decide what you want to do.”
“Yeah, I will.”
There was so much to think about. So much to process. To anybody else, this might have been nothing more than a bureaucratic process I should have thought of before, but to me? Learning that my colleagues—those who had witnessed everything—were actively taking my side, it meant something. Although it didn’t change what I had done. How I had thrown away everything I could have had with Aaron. How I had denied him of the one thing he had asked of me. My full trust. My faith in us. And over what? He would have given me that much, and I had just given up without a fight.
“And please,” Sharon said, “if you could tell Aaron to come by as soon as he’s back. I can’t seem to get ahold of him.”
As soon as he’s back?
“Oh, erm, I don’t … I just …” My words tumbled out of me, mixing with the questions spinning in my head.
“It’s all good, Lina. He was very clear about your relationship. Came here first thing this week to ask if there was any kind of company policy or contract clause that would perhaps complicate things.”
The heartbeat that had flattened, accompanying me during these days without him, came back to life, peeking out. He had come to HR to be sure that all fronts were covered. To reassure me. Because he’d known that I’d need exactly that. Because he had wanted me to feel safe.
Tears that hadn’t been there before were in a rush to get to my eyes.
“Hey, it’s okay, Lina. There aren’t. There’s no reason for you guys to worry. No stones in the way.”
No. The only one taking those possible obstacles on our way and turning them into impediments we couldn’t get over was me.
“Okay,” I muttered, willing my eyes to hold tight a little longer. “That’s good.” Nothing was good. Not a single thing because I had ruined it anyway.
“All right, good.” Sharon’s blonde head bobbed, her motherly eyes warming up. “But please, do tell him to call me back, yes? I know these are hard times, but it’s about his promotion.”
Hard times. Those two words echoed through my mind.
Sharon’s earlier request bounced right back. “Tell Aaron to come by as soon as he’s back.”
“Did … did Aaron leave? Did something happen?”
Sharon’s eyes widened, confusion mixing up with shock. “You don’t know?”
I shook my head, feeling my skin pale. “No.”
Her head shook. “Lina, this is not my place—”
“Please,” I begged, now desperate to know what was wrong. Need clawing at my skin. “Please, Sharon. We had a fight, and I just … messed up. It doesn’t matter. But if there’s something wrong, if something happened to him, I need to know. Please.”
She looked at me for a long moment.
“Darling,” she finally said, and that alone made all the alarms in my head go off, “he had to fly home. His dad is … he has cancer. He has been in a critical state for the last few weeks.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
There was this show I’d loved when I was a teenager. It was an American TV series we got on one of the Spanish national channels—naturally, dubbed. I absolutely loved it. High schoolers with big dreams and bigger egos—or hearts, depending on who you asked—angsty plot twists, and a level of drama someone at sixteen shouldn’t have been experiencing, at least not in a small town somewhere in North Carolina. Or in the north of Spain for that matter. Which was perhaps why it all resonated so much with me.
There was this one episode in particular that had somehow stuck in a way others never did. It started with a voice-over narrator who asked something along the lines of, “what’s the minimum length of time with the power to change your life? A year? A day? A few minutes?”
The answer to that question had come to be that when you were young, one single hour could make a difference. It could change everything.
And I … wholeheartedly disagreed.