“But you’re my family,” he cried out softly, pulling me closer to him. “Please, Vera, don’t do this to me. This can work. We just have to push through it.”
“It can’t work!” I sobbed. “You know it. Chloe Ann has to come first and she will. I don’t want to be the one to ruin her life any further.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head, his eyes closed. His grip on my arm never lessened. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Vera. You don’t. Just trust me that it will all work out—just hang on, please hang on. You promised you wouldn’t give up on us.”
Tears spilled down my cheeks, part of me wanting to collapse into his arms and believe him, to believe that everything was going to be all right. But it would never be all right. I had to do the right thing. My own pain, my own heart, my own future and my sacrifices, they couldn’t matter. I’d always been the villain, the black sheep, the black hole. But now I finally had a chance to be the bigger person, to put someone else first.
I had to take it.
This was my karma for my entire life.
“I’m sorry, Mateo,” I whispered.
“Do you still love me?”
I shook my head. “No,” I lied. To tell him the truth would make everything that much harder.
He began to shudder, his eyes welling with tears. “You’re lying,” he managed to say, his voice cracking. “You’re lying. You love me.”
“I don’t,” I said. “And I can’t stay. I can’t stay here and do this to you and your family.”
“But you’re killing me,” he whispered in agony. He tried to pull me closer to him, but I remained as still as stone, rigid as a tree. Unyielding. I would not yield to this, I would not let my selfish heart and emotions win.
“Vera,” he went on, now a tear rolling down his cheek. I looked away, unable to handle the sight of Mateo crying. “Vera, you are my star. I love you. I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone. I know this isn’t easy, I know you’re hurting and that I am doing things that hurt or don’t make sense to you. But you must believe me that together we can get through this. It is just a bump in the road, if we just hang on we can make it out alive with each other’s hearts intact. We will be stronger.” He wiped angrily at his eyes and swallowed hard. “Please, don’t leave. Please don’t let this be the end of us. Please just give us, give me, another chance. You are my universe and I have nothing if I don’t have you in my life. Please, Vera. I love you like I love the stars, like I love the sky, like I love the earth. I can’t do this without you. I can’t.”
His voice cracked over the last word and I could barely hold my resolve in check. He searched my eyes with his tear-filled ones and I felt like the whole idea of love was being obliterated into space, leaving a black hole behind. I never wanted to leave him, never wanted to hurt him.
But this wasn’t about what I wanted.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I am sorry, Mateo. I never wanted it to be this way. But I am not strong enough for you. This is just too fucking hard.”
I wrestled out of his grasp, steeling whatever was left of my heart, and headed down the hall to the bedroom, ready to pack.
“You don’t get to leave just because it’s hard,” he cried out angrily after me. “You don’t get to pretend you don’t love me because you think that will make it easier on us.”
But I didn’t stop to answer because there was nothing left to say. My choice was made. I locked the door behind me in case he came after me. I pulled my suitcase and backpack out of my closet and began to pack up my life once again.
My heart burned beneath the icy glaze, but it couldn’t melt it now, couldn’t break through. I wouldn’t let it.
Love, our love, had been a shooting star, burning in the darkness, unseen until it got too close, too bright and too quick to capture. It burned out, lost to the deep cold and darkness, to the brutality of space, the infinity above us and in the new emptiness inside of me.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The rest of that day passed by in a blur. In some ways it went too slow—every second I spent packing was a second that terrified me, scared that I would relent, that I would go back into the living room and put my arms around Mateo and tell him I loved him, that I would fight for us, that I wouldn’t leave him.
In other ways, it went too fast. I wanted to hold on to each second that slipped through my fingers. I loved our apartment, I loved our home, I loved our city. I didn’t want to leave this life behind, even with all the hardships; I wanted to hang on to it and pray for the circumstances to change.
I wanted time to wind backward, to go back to Barcelona where we wouldn’t leave the apartment, where I would make him tell Isabel right then, or even back further, when he asked me to move to Spain. I would have told him I’d come when the divorce was final. I would have found a way to stay in Vancouver until then, I would have put up with the wrath of my mother. Anything to avoid the pain of having something so beautiful, so fragile, only to be the one to crush it with your own foot.
Eventually though, I had packed everything in the room and bathroom. The only things I needed in the living room were my laptop, my jacket, and my purse.
Unfortunately, Mateo was sitting on the couch, head in his hands, right by them.
I stood there, the suitcase beside me, the backpack hanging off of one shoulder, stuck in quicksand.
“I need to get my computer,” I whispered.
He didn’t look up at me. “Then take it.”
Shit. He was mad. Of course he was mad, I just broke his heart at the same time I broke mine.
I put my backpack down and leaned over him, quickly snapping up my computer and my purse. I tried not to look at him but I couldn’t help it. My eyes were drawn to him as they always had been. I took in the thickness of his black hair, knowing how soft and smooth it was, how it felt to tug at it with my fingers. His striking eyebrows that were the perfect frame for his teak brown eyes.
Eyes that were now meeting mine. He had looked up in time to catch my gaze. His eyes were still dark as ever, but bloodshot and full of pain. I stared at him, lost, afraid, and yet certain that this was the last time I’d ever see him.
“I love Chloe Ann,” he said hoarsely. “And I love you. In very different yet very equal ways. Can’t you trust me? Can’t you trust that I know what is best?”
I swallowed shards of glass.
I was too afraid to trust him.
I straightened up, and finding the smallest pocket of courage, managed to give him a smile. “You are a good man, Mateo. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
He stared at me, dumbfounded now. “You are actually leaving me. I can’t believe this is happening. Did none of this mean anything to you?” he whispered harshly.
A tear rolled down my cheek. “It meant everything to me.”
I turned around and walked to the door, taking my jacket off the coat hook. It took every parcel of strength I had left in my ravaged soul to keep going, even when I heard him say, “I love you, my Estrella. Please don’t go.”
But I opened the door. And I went.
At first I didn’t know where to go or what to do. Just up and leaving Mateo and my Madrid life wasn’t as straightforward as I had assumed. If I even did assume. All I knew to do was panic and run, and I had no idea where I was running to.
I had very little money, enough for one night at a hotel.
Not enough on my Mastercard to buy a plane ticket home.
In reality, I was totally fucked.
That didn’t stop me from walking and walking through the grey Madrid streets until I was covered in sweat and my back and arms hurt as much as everything else did. I paused, totally unsure of where I was and quickly called Claudia.
“Vera?” she answered.
And then the tears started coming again. I leaned against the cold stone wall of a building, shielding my face from passerby, and letting it all flow until I could speak again.
“I left Mateo,” I told her.
That was all she needed. I gave her vague directions, spotting the name of a few stores. She told me to stay put and thirty minutes later she was roaring down the narrow street and helping my bags and my life into the back of her hatchback.
Claudia didn’t exactly live in the city; her apartment was just to the west, still accessible by metro but things looked a little greener and spread out. It took us about a half hour, and the entire time I cried to her about what had happened—that I had seen him kiss Isabel, that I knew things would never improve, that I was making things harder by staying, that I could ruin his family’s true chance to stay together.
She never said anything except to murmur her shock or sympathies. She was just quiet comfort, which I appreciated more than I could say. Usually in this kind of case, people gave you unsolicited advice or agreed too much with what you were saying, wanting to help but only making things worse.
Claudia was more than eager to offer me anything that I needed. She said that she didn’t have much money to spare, but if it turned out that I couldn’t get my brother or one of my parents to fly me back home, then she would lend me what she could and I would pay her back. The only catch was that it would take her until her next paycheck in two weeks.
I had Claudia’s den as my room for as long as I needed, opting to sleep on an air mattress in there instead of on the couch. With Ricardo living with her, I wanted to give the both of them as much privacy as possible. I set up temporary camp in the narrow room, which Claudia’s fat grey cat Rocco didn’t like too much given that the den was one of his hangouts.
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