Chapter 1 | Valentina
Diana’s apartment smells of burnt coffee, slightly overdone toast, and that impatient ambition unique to seven in the morning.
I’ve been here just over two weeks—long enough to memorize the geography of other people’s noises. I already know when the building creaks—at a quarter past six, when the motor of the old elevator groans to climb to the fifth floor—and I know my neighbor in 3B has an alarm with a shrill melody that rings and rings without anyone ever turning it off, as if she has learned to sleep right through the racket. Two weeks is just a blink when it comes to getting to know a major city, but it’s more than enough time to sense that its streets aren’t going to make things easy for me.
Diana has her back to me, whisking eggs with the energy of someone who has been awake since five. Her hair is pulled up in a bun that is really just the chaotic aftermath of last night, and the earrings she still hasn’t taken off—two massive gold hoops—catch the light with a metallic gleam every time she moves her wrist. I genuinely wonder if she sleeps in them.
“Sit down,” she says without turning around. “And don’t tell me you aren’t hungry.”
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
“You were going to tell me you only want coffee. That you’re running late.” Now she does turn around, pan in hand, giving me that look of hers—eyebrows raised before she even opens her mouth. “But I know your sense of responsibility is going to make you get there absurdly early.”
I sit on the wooden chair with the slightly uneven leg, bracing my left foot to stop the wobbling. She’s right about both: I only want coffee, and I woke up at least forty minutes before my alarm went off because of my nerves. But I’m not going to admit that to her. Diana has a few unbreakable rules. The main one: she doesn’t give relationship advice on an empty stomach. But the second, almost as sacred as the first, is that she won’t tolerate anyone in her kitchen treating food as a mere formality.
“Just coffee,” I ask meekly.
“Eggs and coffee,” she declares, serving up the food.
I’ve left my briefcase by the front door. It’s far too new. The leather hasn’t softened yet; it hasn’t learned the shape of my hand, and when I carry it, it feels like a foreign object in my life—much like the heels subtly pinching my feet, the address of this apartment, or the name of the subway line that takes minutes to carry me downtown. Everything over the last few days has had the texture of something borrowed, of an identity that doesn’t quite belong to me yet.
Diana sets her mug on the table. She sits across from me with her own coffee—black, sugarless, hot enough to scald my throat—and looks at me in that way of hers that always precedes the truths I didn’t ask to hear.
“How are you holding up, Val?”
It isn’t a polite formality. Diana doesn’t ask questions when she already senses the answer.
“Good,” I say, squaring my shoulders.
“I wasn’t asking about your posture.”
I force myself to eat, because otherwise, this silent interrogation will stretch on indefinitely, and we both know who has more patience. Outside, a garbage truck rounds the corner, the distant honk of a car in a hurry sounds, the constant white noise of a metropolis that exists without asking anyone’s permission. I think of my own apartment, of the boxes that still smell of sealed cardboard, and of a silence so dense it feels like a reproach. I’ve fled a disaster only to plunge into a self-imposed void, and I still don’t know if that’s courage or just a temporary truce to keep from looking back.
“I came here to find out what I’m capable of,” I tell her, repeating the words from the night I arrived, when my suitcases were still unopened in the hallway. “I need to know I can trust my own instincts.”
Diana looks at me with the affection of someone who has known me since we were eleven, and the blunt honesty of someone who won’t lie to spare my feelings.
“And how do you plan on doing that?”
I don’t have a clear answer. What I do have is the certainty—the only thing that has remained intact over the last few months—that the city where Pablo and I were going to get married no longer had room for what I was beginning to recognize as my own.
I didn’t run away. That’s what I tell myself. I sent out my resume weeks before the day everything shattered, as if a part of me—a tiny part I ignored during my two years with him—already knew what lay ahead. The instinct I had numbed to keep the peace, the red flags that were right there, perfectly visible to anyone but me, had finally kicked in before it was too late. Or at least, that’s what I convince myself to believe so I don’t feel like a coward. With Pablo, every little lie was a thread I spun myself, weaving it just so I wouldn’t have to see the whole net. His weekend absences, his phone left face down on the nightstand, that new, unfamiliar laugh I’d hear when he took calls on the terrace... I stored it all away and made excuses: “it’s just work stress” or “he needs space.” I thought if I could just box up the pain, it would stop hurting.
Diana takes a sip of her coffee, probably wishing she were telepathic.
“What are you thinking about?” she presses.
“About how long it took me to realize what was happening with Pablo. It was right there. All of it was right there. How did I not see it, Di?”
She sets her mug down on the Formica countertop. Whenever Diana is about to say something I don’t want to hear, she takes a silent moment. It’s the only luxury her honesty allows—an almost compassionate pause before delivering the blow.
“Because you were trying to control it, Val. What you were feeling. You put everything in order, with that habit of yours of locking away your chaos, instead of looking at it head-on and accepting that it was falling apart.” She pauses, pointing her spatula vaguely in my direction. “Control didn’t protect you, Val. It just delayed the blow.”
I stay quiet. Her truth is uncomfortable and sharp. I had held back for two years, maintaining a pristine, display-case order, and all that control hadn’t stopped me from breaking. I had ignored it deliberately because I couldn’t bear to watch it fall to pieces.
“I don’t know how to do that,” I admit in a low voice.
“Nobody does,” Diana concludes, getting up to get more coffee.
The subway takes a few minutes. This time I get off at the right stop without looking at the map—a silly little triumph I note in my head to cheer myself up as I merge into the subterranean current of bodies.
Vidal & Medina occupies four floors of a glass-and-steel building in the financial district. The facade is exactly what the photos on their website promised: clean lines, a solidity bordering on intimidating, the kind of avant-garde architecture that needs no decoration because its sole argument is precision itself. The sign above the glass doors is small and precise: V&M. Nothing more.
It’s twenty past eight. My meeting with Carolina Medina is at nine.
I stop on the opposite sidewalk, the morning traffic surging forward with the dull impatience of those who don’t know why they are in a hurry but cannot stop anyway. Being forty minutes early is a lot of time when you don’t have anyone to text to say “I’m here” or “wish me luck.” Loneliness in a new city is exactly this: an accumulation of empty minutes you have to carry on your shoulders while pretending to be in a hurry under the gaze of strangers.
I sway slightly on my feet, rocking back and forth—a nervous habit my body falls into when it doesn’t know what to do with itself in a space. The briefcase feels heavy in my hand. The rigid leather chafes against my fingers. And then, my eyes drift down and I see it.
Wrapped around the handle of the briefcase, like an unexpected bow my hand finds before my eyes do, is a thin black leather strap.
I stand frozen in the middle of the sidewalk, ignoring the stream of pedestrians swerving around me with impatience. I don’t remember putting it there. I don’t remember bringing it, let alone seeing it in Diana’s cluttered drawers. I hold it for a moment between my thumb and forefinger; the leather is strangely soft, worn and smoothed by the touch of other fingers, its edges subtly frayed. It smells old, of an energy that isn’t mine but suddenly clings to my journey. I feel a prickle of unease, almost as if the strap were an object with a memory of its own, determined to anchor itself to my new beginning.
“Just once,” I whisper, and the words escape my lips before I can stop them, old and worn like the echo of an inertia I still don’t know how to break, carrying all the bitterness of having repeated them too many times in the dark. It was the worn-out promise Pablo and I used to make: it only has to work once. But it had turned into just one more time and I’m leaving, just one more time and I’ll get it right this time, just one more time and things will go back to how they were.
I leave the strap where it is, wrapped around the fresh leather of the briefcase, and cross the street.
The glass doors glide wide open before I even have to touch them, as if the building already has my name on an internal register. The lobby is soaring, silent, and cold. The marble floor reflects the soft ceiling lights, and the air smells clean—that neutral, sterile scent of corporations where mistakes aren’t forgiven because they leave a mark.
I walk up to the reception desk. The woman on the other side, sporting an impeccable bun and a blank expression, looks up.
“Good morning. Do you have an appointment?”
“Good morning. Valentina Reyes,” I say, my voice sounding steadier than I expected. “I have a nine o’clock meeting with Mrs. Medina.”
She types something on her computer, nods, and offers me a practiced, professional smile.
“You’re quite early, Miss Reyes. You can wait in the lobby or go straight up to the fourth floor. Rodrigo will meet you there.”
“I’ll head up, thank you.”
I make my way to the elevators. The metallic reflection of the doors sends back the image of a stranger: a woman armed with an impeccable pencil skirt and hair pulled back with an almost defensive rigidity. I’ve styled this disguise to convince the city—and perhaps myself—that I control the field, that I know exactly what laws govern this place. But the stiff, overly new briefcase betrays me. It’s the shield of someone who still fears the blows. The black leather strap, swaying on the handle, contrasts with my own stiffness like a dissonant note in an overly rehearsed score.
I press the button. The elevator arrives with a soft, almost discreet chime, breaking the lobby’s silence. The doors slide open.
I hesitate for half a second—just long enough to recognize the urge to turn back, walk through the revolving doors, and return to Diana’s apartment, but not long enough to actually do it—and step inside. As the doors close, the outside world is reduced to a thin line of light that vanishes without resistance.
I’m left alone with my reflection in the cabin mirror. I hold my briefcase with both hands, my fingers locked around the handle with a force I can no longer distinguish as conviction or fear.
“Just once,” I tell myself, but this time it’s different. It’s free of bitterness, as if I’m starting to believe it again, as the elevator begins its ascent to the fourth floor, toward the office where a destiny I have yet to plan for is waiting.
