Chapter 67
Chapter 67
Mira’s POV
“He’s outside.”
Zara said it the way she announced most disasters, casually, from the kitchen, like she was reporting the weather and not the arrival of the one person capable of dismantling my entire emotional architecture with a single look.
I put down my tea. “What do you mean he’s outside?”
“I mean there’s a very tall, very expensive looking man standing at our front door who is not a delivery guy.”
She appeared in the doorway, leaning against the frame with her mug and zero urgency. “Unless Gucci started doing same day deliveries. Which honestly at this point wouldn’t surprise me.”
“Zara.”
“Mira.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before you opened it?”
“I didn’t open it yet,” she replied pleasantly. “I saw him through the peephole and came to warn you. You’re welcome by the way. Most people would have just let him in.”
I stood up too fast and my chest reminded me immediately that we didn’t do that anymore, a sharp flash of protest that I absorbed without showing on my face. I pressed my hand briefly against my ribs and breathed once.
“How do I look?” I asked.
Zara tilted her head, studying me with the forensic attention of someone conducting an assessment they’d already completed.
“Like a woman who has been surviving on toast and emotional damage for two weeks,” she replied. “Very chic actually. Tragic but chic.”
“Helpful. Thank you.”
“You look fine, Mira.” Her voice dropped slightly, losing the sarcasm just for a second. “You always look fine. Annoyingly.”
The knock at the door landed before I could respond.
We both looked at it.
“You want me to tell him you moved countries?” Zara offered.
“Open the door, Zara.”
“I could tell him you joined a silent monastery. Very believable given how little you’ve been speaking lately—”
“Zara.”
She sighed dramatically and went to open it.
He looked tired.
That was the first thing I noticed and immediately hated that I noticed. Alejandro Montenegro standing in my best friend’s doorway in dark clothes, jaw tight, eyes finding me across the room before he’d fully stepped inside and he looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with the particular exhaustion of carrying something heavy for too long.
I knew that tired. I lived in it.
“Mira,” he said.
“You could have called,” I replied, because it was the safest thing in my head at that moment.
“You stopped picking up.”
“You stopped answering first.” I shot back.
The corner of his jaw tightened. “I know.”
Zara looked between us with the expression of someone watching a tennis match they’d paid good money for.
“Right,” she announced to nobody in particular. “I suddenly desperately need to reorganize my sock drawer. Fascinating hobby. Very time consuming.”
She disappeared down the hallway, but her door didn’t fully close.
I looked at him standing there and thought about every version of this conversation I’d rehearsed at 2am on this couch and how none of them had started like this, with him just showing up and looking at me like that, like I was something he’d been trying to find the right words for and had given up on finding them and just drove here instead.
“Why are you here, Dro?” I asked quietly.
“I know about Scarlett’s.”
The room tilted slightly.
Not literally. Just in that specific way it did when something you’d been dreading for a long time finally arrived and your body registered it before your brain caught up.
I kept my face completely still. “How?”
“My father had a file,” he replied. “Built before you ever walked into that house. I found it three weeks ago.”
Three weeks.
He’d known for three weeks and said nothing and not answered my calls and let me sit here thinking about the gala and Candy and a proposal I’d said no to—
“Three weeks,” I repeated, hearing the edge in my own voice.
“I needed time to—”
“To what?” I cut across him, stepping closer because standing still suddenly felt impossible. “To decide how you felt about it? To figure out whether I was worth the inconvenience of a complicated past? Because that’s a lot of time, Alejandro. That’s a lot of time to sit with someone’s worst years and say absolutely nothing.”
“That’s not what I was doing,” he said firmly.
“Then tell me what you were doing,” I shot back. “Because from where I’m standing it looks exactly like every other person who ever found out and decided I was too much work.”
“I was trying to find your mother.”
The words landed like something physical.
I stared at him.
“What?” I whispered.
He held my gaze, steady and certain. “Flora Martinez. She’s alive, Mira. She didn’t die in that crash—” He stopped himself, something moving across his expression like he’d caught himself getting ahead of something.
“I’m still putting the pieces together. I don’t have everything yet. But I needed you to know that I wasn’t sitting on that file deciding whether you were worth it.” His voice dropped. “That was never the question.”
The silence between us was enormous.
I couldn’t breathe properly and for once it had nothing to do with my heart condition.
“You’re lying,” I said, but my voice had lost all its edges.
“I’m not.”
“My mother is dead.”
“Mira—”
“They found the wreckage, there was a funeral, I stood at an empty grave and—” My voice cracked and I stopped, pressing my fingers against my mouth, furious at myself for it.
Alejandro crossed the room in three steps and his hands found my face before I could step back, tilting it up, making me look at him directly.
“I’m not lying to you,” he said quietly. “I would never lie to you about something like this. Not this.”
I looked up at him with his hands on my face and my eyes doing things I hadn’t given them permission to do and my chest aching in at least two different ways simultaneously.
“If you’re wrong,” I managed.
“I know,” he said.
“If you’re wrong I will never forgive you for this.”
“I know that too.”
I searched his face for the lie and couldn’t find it, which was either the best or worst thing that had happened to me in weeks.
“Your hands are cold,” he said softly, and I realized mine had come up to wrap around his wrists without me noticing.
“They’re always cold,” I whispered.
He looked at me for a long moment, something in his eyes that I felt everywhere.
“I know,” he said quietly. “I remember.”
Down the hallway, very distinctly, I heard Zara’s voice through her barely closed door.
“Oh my God just kiss her already, I’m dying in here.”
Despite everything, the file, the three weeks, my mother, all of it, I laughed.
It came out shaky and wet at the edges but it was real, and I felt Alejandro’s thumbs brush my cheeks as it happened, catching what had escaped without making it into a bigger thing than it was.
“Your best friend,” he said.
“I know,” I replied, still laughing slightly. “She’s a disaster.”
“RUDE,” Zara called from behind her door. “I can hear you.”
He was still holding my face.
I was still holding his wrists. And neither of us had moved.
“I’m still angry at you,” I said.
“I know,” he replied.
“The gala—”
“I didn’t know,” he said firmly. “I need you to believe that. He did it without telling me and I confronted him the same night.”
I studied him.
“Candy is still in your house,” I scoffed.
Something crossed his face. “Not for much longer.”
“That’s not a real answer.”
“It’s the only one I have tonight,” he admitted. “But I’m working on it.”
I looked at him for a long moment.
Then I stepped back, out of his hands, because staying inside them felt like a decision I wasn’t ready to make yet, not with everything still sitting unresolved between us.
“You should go,” I said quietly.
He didn’t argue.
Didn’t push.
Just looked at me with that tired, certain expression.
“I’ll find the rest of it,” he said. “About your mother. I promise you.”
I nodded once, not trusting my voice with anything longer.
He moved toward the door, pausing with his hand on the frame, half turned back toward me.
“Mira.”
“Don’t,” I said softly. “Not tonight. Just—” I exhaled. “Find what you’re looking for first. Then we’ll talk.”
He looked at me for one more long second. Then he left.
The door clicked shut and I stood in the middle of Zara’s living room and pressed both hands flat against my chest and breathed.
Zara’s door flew open approximately one second later.
“YOUR MOTHER IS ALIVE?” she shrieked.