After three days, Gabriella no longer wakes up with a stab of apprehension in the pit of her stomach. After three days, she can forget the call and the what-if. There is neither to be had. The weight of the decision has been lifted off her shoulders, and she feels immensely happy and relieved.
In the evenings, she calls her father and talks about other things. Trivial chitchat. The kind that simply provides more comfort than silence. It soothes her to speak with him; it always has. They can spend hours digressing over a book, discussing a shoot. But now, for the first time, she’s careful about what she mentions: her workout schedule, outings with Juan Carlos that are controlled and predictable—dinner, drinks, dancing one night—with people she’s known for years and years. People who are safe, whom any father would approve of unless the surface was scratched too deep.
“Are you thinking about your future?” he invariably asks, because he just can’t help himself.
“I’m thinking!” she says, trying not to snap at him.
She’s thinking that what she’s been doing all these years maybe isn’t what she wants to do anymore. Sometimes music flows to her and from her, but sometimes it doesn’t. Lately, that happens more and more, and she can’t seem to find what she had and what made her special, and she wonders if one can simply grow out of talent. But she can’t tell her father that because he’d be so disappointed in her, so disappointed to find out she’s not extraordinary after all.
Lying on her bed, her feet propped up against the headboard, Gabriella gnaws at her thumb.
“What’s eating you up to make you do that?” she hears Angel ask in her mind.
She tells herself she’s already forgotten her one-night stand. But could you even call it that? A one-night dance, maybe. One night. Period.
In the beginning, the thought crossed her mind that Juan Carlos would bring it up in front of their friends.
“Guess who Gabriella’s new boyfriend is,” he’d say, laughing over drinks.
It is, she’d admit, perfect fodder for teasing.
Gabriella and the Thug.
But Juan Carlos doesn’t do things like that. She constantly underestimates this man, because he is a man at twenty-four, with a grown-up’s sensibility to social norms that paralyzes her and fills her with self-doubt.
It’s always been that way, ever since they were children.
“Gabriella, you can’t wear that!”
“Gabriella, I know in the States no one cares what you do or how you act, but here, we do.”
She has always kowtowed to him. As a child she was painfully shy and awkward with people her age. Half of her schooling had taken place with tutors on movie sets, where her friends were child actors with overbearing moms—moms that she sometimes wished she had. In the evenings, she would put on headphones and practice on the Clavinova her father let her bring with her since she turned ten and it became apparent that piano lessons weren’t just another distraction.
She doesn’t kowtow to Juan Carlos anymore, though. She’s beautiful now. But inexplicably, she still wants to please him.
“Well, he hasn’t called me, just thought I’d let you know,” she countered that morning at the club, while running around the golf course.
“Who?” he asked nonchalantly.
“Angel Silva, of course,” she replies, laughing.
“Don’t know him,” Juan Carlos answers shortly, picking up his pace as he climbs the hill that leads to the ninth hole.
The view is breathtaking from there, sweeping down the fairway dotted with mango trees, along the river that borders the course, and down below to the stables.
But he doesn’t stop or even break his stride, merely looking back at her and shouting, “You’re falling behind, prima!” and just like that drops the subject and the name from his existence.
And she did, too. Well, at least she’s trying, and by force of will, even the remarkable color of Angel’s eyes starts to slip into oblivion.