Chapter 315: Are you there yet?
"Because there’s nothing to decide." She looked at Janet directly. Her eyes were clear and dry and very tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
"I spent a long time being good and patient and open, and it gutted me, Janet. I was a kind person, and it was used, and I am done, I am long overdue to stop letting that be the price of being who I am." She paused.
"I have done the work. I have made my peace with most of it. And I am not going to let one revelation undo that." Another pause, smaller. "I can’t."
Janet was quiet. "Seren came to see me yesterday," Amara said. Janet blinked. "I know. Adelaide told me this morning."
"She... " Amara stopped. She looked at the middle distance for a moment, and the careful composure on her face did something complicated and then resolved back into composure, but altered. Like light through water.
"She read me six pages from a notebook. Things she remembered. Things she was sorry for." She pressed her fingers together on the desk. "She’s twelve years old."
"I know," Janet said softly.
"And I listened to her because it was the right thing to do, and she deserved to be heard. And then she left without asking for anything. She just... she left." She looked at Janet.
"That child left without asking for a single thing in return." Neither of them said anything for a moment.
The building made its ordinary daytime sounds around them a phone ringing distantly, voices in another corridor, the low pulse of the ventilation system.
"She has her eyes," Amara said. Quietly. Almost to herself. As if the knowledge had only just arranged itself into language.
"I thought it was, I thought I was imagining it, or projecting, or... " She breathed.
"She has Elera’s eyes."
She looked at her desk. At the three open folders. At the work that was still there, still real, still hers.
She picked up the pen.
"I’m not going to feel bad for them," she said. "I want you to know that. I’m not this isn’t a story where I hear this, and everything opens up again. I can’t do that."
She said it without bitterness. The way you state a fact about your own limits that you have arrived at honestly, over a long time, through genuine effort. "
Janet nodded. She stood up. At the door, she stopped. "She really didn’t ask for anything?" she said.
Amara did not look up from the folder she had opened. "She thanked me," she said, "for listening."
Janet stood there for a moment.
Then she opened the door and went back to her own work, and left Amara alone with all the things she was choosing, carefully, deliberately, and at great cost, to put down.
—
Verenza smelled the same as it always had. That was the first thing Yvette noticed.
She stood on the platform with her single carry-on at her feet and let the crowd move around her, businessmen with briefcases, a school group in yellow vests, a pair of elderly women sharing a paper bag of something, and breathed in the particular smell of this place.
Iron and diesel and the ghost of espresso from the store near the east exit. Some combination of stone and damp air that was specific to this city and no other city she had ever been in.
Three years.
She had been gone three years, and this place smelled exactly the same, and she was not the same person who had left it.
She picked up her bag. She had not planned to leave the way she left.
That was the story she had told herself for a long time and she had told it so many times and with such precision that she had almost believed it, that the Alcantara family had closed in around her and pressed her out, that Amara’s call had been the act of a woman trying to dismantle her, that she had been a mother fighting for her daughter in hostile territory and they had simply outweighed her.
She had believed that for about eight months.
Then she had stopped sleeping well and started thinking clearly, and the story had become harder to maintain in the sharp, unforgiving light of three in the morning.
The truth was simpler and worse, she had been so consumed by fury at Julian, at Amara, at the situation that had slipped her control that she had stopped being useful to her own daughter.
The Alcantara family had not forced her out. They had simply presented her with her own reflection, and she had not been able to look at it, so she had left.
She had left. Her baby was out there somewhere in this city, and she had left. Yvette set her jaw and walked toward the taxi rank.
She was back now. She was ready in a way she had not been ready before. Three years of working through it, and she had worked through it, genuinely, with a therapist in Madrid who did not permit her to perform self-awareness without actually achieving it, had stripped her down to something that was smaller than she used to be and considerably harder.
She was not here to reclaim her life or reclaim Julian or prove anything to anyone. She was here to find her daughter. Everything else was noise.
The cab driver tried to make conversation, and she answered in monosyllables, watching the city reassemble itself outside the window familiar streets, familiar buildings, new shop fronts where old ones had been, a scaffolding where she remembered a clean facade. A city living its ordinary life without her in it, as cities do.
Her phone buzzed.
Her best friend: Are you there yet?
She typed back: Just arrived.
Her Best friend: Be careful. And Yvette, be patient. You know what happened last time, Lucy and Lumi are both find hopefully you will find Lucia too.
She put the phone away.