“Before you decide anything, you should go out and get wasted.”
Candela looked at Patricia in shock, as if she couldn’t believe she agreed with her suggestion.
“Amen, sister.”
“Yeah, right?” Patricia put the phone face down on the table and smoothed her hair. “All three of us could go get dinner and drinks. Spill the tea while we get sauced. Dance a little to forget it all.”
“You have tea to spill?” Candela teased.
“Ah, darling. When you don’t have problems, you look for them. And if you can’t find them…you imagine them.”
They both looked at me, and I blinked, like it was the only way I could communicate with them after what had informally become known as the INCIDENT.
“You have to move. You’ve been in the same position since yesterday.”
“Same position and zero verbal communication.”
“My mother threw me out of her house yesterday because she didn’t ‘want gossip.’” I pointed out. “So that’s inaccurate. I did a lot of things yesterday: I ran through a field to flee my wedding, I drank a Coke in a gas station, I broke my engagement, I put my feet on a horrible chair that could have been a prop from Beauty and the Beast, I ordered a Cabify, I came home, I sent you two a message, I ate two lorazepams for dinner, and, because even the pharmaceutical industry hates me and it didn’t have the desired effect, namely sleeping for at least eighteen hours, I got up to take another one at nine in the morning, but you wouldn’t let me. So, no, I haven’t been in the same position since yesterday.”
“Do you remember her being so grouchy?” Candela looked at Patricia.
“Yes.” Patricia nodded.
“Ah, well, I guess I must have idealized you both with the distance because I’m suddenly realizing you’re not that pretty either.”
Patricia rolled her eyes. There was no point telling her she wasn’t that pretty; she has mirrors in her house.
Candela went over to my wardrobe and rifled through my clothes, taking the initiative to get the plan rolling immediately. Patricia sat next to me and murmured softly.
“Have you heard anything from Filippo?”
“Do I look like I’ve heard anything from Filippo?”
“Come on, Margot. It’s not that deep. How long can gossip last? We’re living in the information age. These things are a trending topic for a few hours and then they disappear. So what if there are photos of you on the internet squeezing through a hole in a fence to escape your wedding? Anyway…you’re a badass! I never would have thought you had it in you to cause a scene like that.”
“Hey, come on,” Candela hustled over to me. “I put together an outfit for you. Now all you have to do is shower and get dressed. I’ll book us a table at… Is Perra Chica still cool?”
She held up two hangers with clothes so badly mismatched I didn’t even recognize them.
“That blouse goes with the black pants hanging next to it, and that skirt goes with the pale-pink shirt in the top drawer,” I said.
“Well, clothes can mingle with other garments, you know? It’s not considered adultery.”
“Candela, serious question.” Patricia elegantly lifted her ring finger. “Are you color-blind?”
I flopped down and sighed.
“You’re doing this all wrong. Candela is the one who should be giving me a pep talk about how the INCIDENT doesn’t really matter, and, Patricia, you should be choosing the clothes for going out tonight.”
They both whooped.
“So we’re going out then?”
“Yeah, of course.” I turned my back to them. “Close the door behind you when you leave.”
After twenty minutes of jiggling hangers at me and trying on my shoes they realized I wasn’t going to go out on a bender with them under any circumstances. I know they had good intentions. They’re my sisters; I don’t think anyone loves me as much as they do. But they weren’t thinking it through. If they had, they would have realized that being seen the day after my failed wedding drinking in some trendy bar would be super tacky. And that wasn’t all: it just didn’t make sense.
I wanted to get Filippo back, not forget him. I wanted to get back our Sunday mornings, reading on the high stools in a home I hated without him while we listened to Italian music that I didn’t know. I wanted to get back nights cuddling in bed, telling each other how our days had been. I wanted our Thursdays when we ate Vietnamese food, for fuck’s sake. And I was hungry.
“I want Vietnamese food.”
So that’s how I ended up spending Saturday in one of Filippo’s old shirts, wrapped in our duvet (even though it wasn’t exactly cold) eating Vietnamese spring rolls like the world was ending. My sisters were there, but I couldn’t tell you what they were doing. I didn’t even answer the consoling messages from my godfather, a member of the board. The whole world could go to hell.
Now I know that the only thing I wanted was to stay quiet and let the days pass without needing to make a decision. Everything was so bleak that I felt like making any decision would mean I was unable to go back and settle the chaos. I was so scared…any decision seemed like a huge potential fuckup.
The normal course of action, I guess, would have been to listen to myself. You didn’t just hightail it from a wedding for no reason. Panic always has an invisible little friend who whispers shit in your ear. If I had known what mine was, maybe I would have understood something. But, besides that, on a much more superficial level, I didn’t even know if I wanted to hole up at home or do the opposite, run away to find the meaning of life. For the love of God, I couldn’t even decide whether I wanted my tea hot or iced in the mornings…
But, on Sunday, while Candela jabbered with her mouth full of ultra-processed candy that Khloe was her favorite Kardashian, I decided I didn’t want anything that they assumed would comfort me in that moment. I didn’t want nights slathering on face masks, pretending to watch TV while I stuffed myself with sweets and then feeling bad because I was going to get fat and then thinking it’s fine because once in our lives we should all indulge ourselves and wallow in our own misery and…then back down the rabbit hole to start the cycle again. What I wanted was to forget that I’d had some kind of breakdown that had destroyed my life. I missed the feeling of control over myself, and I only had one place on earth where I felt like a boss bitch: my job. Ironically, there were no objectives that felt impossible to reach there; everything was a question of time and effort. Between the four walls of my office, the world was manageable…as long as I didn’t have to see anyone or go to a board meeting.
I figured the best way to slowly get my life back was…returning to normality. I guess acceptance goes through phases and I was still in the first phase.
I always felt more comfortable in my office than in my house. In my palatial and jaw-dropping apartment on Paseo de la Castellana, I always felt like I was living in the set of an ad or a hotel lobby. Manufactured coziness, too flawless; I always felt like sitting on the couch would mess everything up. But my office was…warm. It didn’t matter if there were papers scattered everywhere, if the last meeting had left a trail of dirty coffee cups, or if the trash was overflowing. Hard work calls for disorder.
Plus, my office was a beautiful place. Pleasant. Nothing garish. It had a beautiful brown carpet that reminded me of the Swiss chocolates my sisters and I bought at the airport on the way home for the holidays, with modern and elegant furniture and a beautiful painting I had bought for my apartment but ended up hanging there because it was where I really felt at home.
As soon as I got into the building and breathed in its familiar smell, I felt much calmer. There in my crystal palace, everything was calm, and Patricia was right…how long would it take, in the height of the information age, for everyone to forget what had happened? Life goes on. Everything would get back to normal sooner or later.
I got onto the elevator. I greeted the regular mail room guy with a smile. I took a sip of my latte. I breathed in deep. Fine. Calm. Serenity. Real life…
The elevator doors opened opposite the reception desk, where Sonia should be sitting, but…nobody was there. Nobody except noise. Actually, more than noise. I would call it a hubbub. Like in the villages when the open-air dancing ends but people still want to party. Bursts of laughter, scattered whoops, even a few snatches of music filtering through the voices. And that definitely wasn’t normal.
A speaker was playing so loudly it was making the glass vibrate, and I started to walk toward the room where my team was gathered, passing by reception, the photocopier corner, the kitchen, and the coffee machines. I poked my head into the hallway and saw Sonia trying to call them to order; I could hear how nervous she was, tutting in all directions, saying they were jerks, that this wasn’t right. When I heard, “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you,” and a loud and blunt “Ingrates,” I knew the score.
The laughter continued when I appeared in front of them, where they were crowded around a computer screen.
“What’s going on?” I asked, serious, contained, cold.
The iciest silence you can imagine settled, crushing us all. Inside I was losing my shit, so humiliated that I could feel each and every fiber of my jacket rubbing against my skin.
My whole team stared at me in shock and terror. And Sonia let out a horrified yelp.
“Argh!” she squealed, and her hand flew to her chest. “Marg…Margarita.” Her eyes darted around frantically but didn’t find what she seemed to be looking for and finally landed back on me with a horrified expression. “Go to your office. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of this mess.”
I gestured to the owner of the screen they were all looking at to turn it around, but he didn’t move. I twirled my index finger, praying and crying inside that they couldn’t tell how I felt. A boss, even one who aspires to be a good boss, can’t show how crushed they are by feelings, or their team will feel like there’s no one at the helm.
“Margarita,” he begged. It was one of my managers, by the way. Someone I trusted.
“Turn the screen around,” I managed to get out. “And don’t even think about minimizing what you’re looking at because I’ll call IT and get all the skeletons out of your computer. And that’ll be way worse.”
He sighed and turned it so slowly I thought I would scream.
Two memes. That’s what was causing so much hilarity, two memes. Of me, of course. In one of them, a photo where I was sprinting in my wedding dress and they could see the shoes I was wearing were Nike. Underneath someone had added their very famous slogan: “Just do it.” Fine. The worst part was, it was clear that someone who had been invited to the wedding had leaked the photo. But, if that weren’t bad enough, the next one was a replica of the poster for Runaway Bride, where they had replaced Julia Roberts’s face with mine and Richard Gere with Luigi’s, Mario’s brother, the video-game character.
I had to remind myself to breathe.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t send them to HR. I didn’t even give them a “you’re all fired, you dicks” look. I just nodded, turned around, and walked to my office without looking back.
I hadn’t even had time to turn my computer on when my phone started ringing and the CEO’s name appeared on the screen. He was obviously the poor sap the board had saddled with this task.
“Yes?” I answered after swallowing the lump in my throat.
“Margarita…how are you?”
“Fabulous.” Keep your cards close, Margot, you’re in hostile territory.
“Right, um…could you clear your calendar for a last-minute meeting?”
“My calendar is clear. I was supposed to be on vacation, as you might recall.”
“Yes, right. I didn’t want to bring it up.”
“Well, I brought it up, so let’s stop ignoring the elephant in the room.”
“Okay. Come to the meeting room in half an hour, please. The board would like to speak with you.”
Sonia had to put three lime blossom tea bags in my cup and rub my back for five minutes. I thought I was having a heart attack.
Have you seen the movie 300? Yes? Well, no spoilers just in case, but there’s this moment when the protagonist, Leonidas, is forced to visit the Oracle of Delphi, where he asks the Ephoros something I won’t reveal. The Ephoros are a gang of hooded beings who have very bad vibes and make your skin crawl to the max. It’s not just that they look like they’ve suffered from some archaic disease… The thing is they look like the disease personified, with eyes. Half pus-filled blisters, half zombies. If you’ve seen it, you remember them, and if not, well, you get the idea. That’s exactly how I saw the members of the board, even down to the hooded capes. Mostly made up of men who gave you goose bumps. As soon as I joined the heart of the power at the company, I had to make it very clear I didn’t find the jokes about breasts, hookers, rape, and brothels, and the comments about my clothes funny at all. But I mean, really, not at all. Still, they scared me. They were like those Ephoros, but in suits, ties, tacky cuff links, and hideous but expensive shoes.
You can imagine how much I wanted to see them that day of all days. Shit. They had all been at the wedding. Couldn’t they cut me some slack?
“How’s it going?” I asked, steeling myself as I walked in and found them all sitting in their chairs, around the enormous table where we held meetings.
“Fine. Sit down, Margarita, we’d like to talk to you.”
Instead of the strong tea, I should have taken a pill. Or a shot of whiskey. Something to help me stomach the paternalistic undertones.
“We’re speaking as equals, right?” I asked as I sat down.
“Of course, Margarita. We’re colleagues.”
“Of course. I do hold thirty-seven percent of the shares of this group.”
They all nodded.
“I say that because I’d like to point out that I didn’t have the luck of meeting my father in this lifetime. They say he was a good man. I don’t need anyone to come in and try to be a father figure… Am I making myself clear?”
“Perfectly.” The president took the lead.
Fucking shit. I never should have approved this guy being appointed. He was like Krampus. Only without the goat legs.
“You see, Margarita…what happened on Friday was…”
“Intense,” I filled in the blank for him.
“It must have been very difficult for you. A traumatic experience. We understand you’re looking for a little comfort here at work.”
Comfort, that son of a bitch said. What a douche.
“But?”
I hate buts.
“But we think it still might be a good idea for you to take your vacation. All your vacation days. The business owes you seventy-six days off.”
“Well, these have been hard years,” I pointed out to guilt-trip them for their monthlong vacations every summer, plus a week off every winter to go skiing.
“Yes, and we think it might have taken its toll. That’s why—”
“I appreciate your intentions, but I would feel better coming in to work, to be honest. I want to keep my mind busy.”
“Margot…” My godfather, one of the men my father trusted, turned to me. He was the only member of the board I would save from a burning building. And he didn’t look like the Ephoros. “You know I would never support anything I thought was bad or unfair to you, but…you have to take these vacation days. You’re thirty-two, and you have to do some self-care and put yourself first.”
“I don’t need a vacation,” I lied.
“Well, we think you do.”
“You had an incident with your staff today, right?” another one pointed out.
“So let me get this straight…I have to take my vacation days because I need to rest and think about myself or to get the stink a little further away from the business’s premises?”
“Margot, please…take the vacation,” my godfather pleaded once more.
“Do I have a choice?”
“No.”
I put my elbows on the table and buried my face in my hands.
“Don’t do this to me.”
“The business will put any of our hotels at your disposal so you can rest, relax, get away from all this—”
“I don’t want to get away.”
“Well, you should.”
I scoffed and stood up.
“Sweetheart…” my godfather called out before I hurried out of the room. “Enjoy a few days. A month if you want. Come back whenever you want, but…really, you need to stop and think about what’s important, and right now that’s not work.”
When I got to my office, I only had the strength to wordlessly beckon Sonia over. I don’t think I had ever been so sparing with my words to her as I was that day. She called one of the company cars to take me home. And when I got there, I peeled off my suit, climbed into bed, and ignored Candela until she finally gave up.