My breath stutters because for a minute, I forgot about everything. The cameras and the story that I crafted with surgical precision. A story she thinks is real because I let her meet him under false pretenses. I let myself pretend it was harmless.
“You… saw that?”
“Mija, everyone saw that,” she says, like it’s the cutest thing in the world. “My coworkers practicallytackled me at lunch, asking if it was the same Kyle I met at dinner. When I said yes, they almost fainted! I told them I didn’t know he was famous…ay, dios mío,how could you hide that from me.”
“I didn’t hide anything.” Heat blooms beneath my skin, an impossible mix of guilt and embarrassment that makes it hard to breathe. “It just… never came up.”
“You should have brought it up. He was so polite, and he looked at you like—well.” She clears her throat as if editing herself. “I just didn’t realize he was KyleHendrixuntil the television told everyone.”
“I didn’t tell you because…” The truth stumbles on my tongue. “It’s not really like that.”
“Like what?” Her voice dips, turning careful. “You told me you had a boyfriend,cariño. When I heard a man’s voice on the phone, I almost screamed with happiness because you had finally decided to let someone in.”
I close my eyes and let that night play behind my eyelids in vivid detail. The way I panicked when she asked, and how Kyle overheard everything and offered.
“It’s complicated,” I say, my voice shrinking around the edges.
She hears the shift immediately.“Mija... does he treat you well? No me mientas.”
Cutting straight through the noise to the one thing that has ever mattered to her—am I being cared for. Not the headlines. Not the TV chatter. Not the fact that she apparently recognized him before I ever said hisname out loud, just whether he treats me well. And somehow, that makes the lie feel heavier.
“Yes,” I whisper. “He’s… good. Really good. It’s just… not what you think.”
“¿De veras?” There’s a pause long enough for my pulse to climb into my throat. “Then tell me what’s wrong.”
What do I tell her? That it’s a role we agreed to play? A lie that started as a convenience and turned into something I don’t have language for? That the man she invited into her kitchen, the one who charmed her without trying, is only mine in a way that doesn’t belong to either of us?
“It’s work,” I finally say, the word scraping on its way out. “This thing between us it’s for the team’s optics. It’s not… romantic.”
“Ay, mija…” Her voice softens in a way that presses against every bruise I’ve been ignoring. “Sometimes beautiful things start in strange places. But more importantly, is your heart safe?”
“Sí,” I whisper, though my voice betrays me with the smallest crack. “Está bien, Mamá.”
“Fine isn’t the same as happiness. All I want…” Her voice wavers in that heartbreaking, motherish way. “Es que seas feliz, mija. Nothing else matters.”
The sentence lands like a stone dropped straight into the center of my chest, heavy enough to make something inside me tilt. We talk a little longer about the neighbor’s cat that keeps wandering into her yard. I make all the right noises at all the right moments, andsomewhere between them, my chest feels like it’s filling with wet cement.
When we hang up, things don’t feel the same. Everything is still where it belongs, louder somehow despite the silence, but it feels like someone pressed a thumb into the softest part of my sternum and left it throbbing.
I stand there with the phone still in my hand, blinking at nothing. My laptop sits on the coffee table, the screen reflecting a shadow of my face—blurred edges, tired eyes, a woman holding too much together with too little thread. I walk over on autopilot, tap the trackpad. The gala schedule blooms open in sharp lines and neat organized colors, everything I’m supposed to be.
I lower myself onto the couch, the cushion dipping under my weight as if even it knows I’m carrying too much. The cursor blinks at the top of the document like it’s waiting for me to re-enter the version of myself who can breathe inside spreadsheets and bullet points.
I scroll and stop on his name, like I do every single time. My chest tightens so abruptly it forces a breath out of me, and my mother’s voice echoes:You always do. They’re lucky to have you.Kyle’s voice follows, quieter but sharper:It doesn’t feel like work.
I press my fingertips into the trackpad until the plastic squeaks, just to feel something anchored. “Keep it professional.”
The words fall flat, feeling like a flimsy boundary drawn in pencil becauseprofessionaldoesn’t explainthe electric shock of seeing him in the hallway today or the way he took one step toward me like he didn’t even realize he was doing it. It doesn’t explain how my pulse stuttered in a way it hasn’t for anyone in years. And it doesn’t explain why my mother’s assumption—her hopeful belief that I’d finally let someone in—hurt as much as it did.
I drop my head back against the couch and stare at the ceiling until the plaster blurs. I could stop this and tell the team the lie isn’t worth the fallout. That the boundary is bending too far. That my judgment is compromised. They’d believe me and move on, and I’d be safe again.
The thought lands wrong, like stepping into a room I used to live in and finding it too small now. I close the laptop, and the screen goes dark, my reflection staring back at me—shoulders stiff, eyes too bright. A woman who turned competence into armor and forgot how to take any of it off.
“I don’t think I can keep the lines from blurring.”
Who am I kidding? The line already feels smudged. I think about the way he looked at me earlier, the breath I didn’t let myself take, the way I wanted to lean into him instead of holding myself upright with both hands.
My chest squeezes because wanting is dangerous. It gets you hurt, and it’s the one thing I’ve trained myself out of since the moment I learned that softness isn’t rewarded in rooms like this. It’s exploited. I learned that hard lesson young, and I’ve spent everyday since building walls that no one could twist into a weakness again.
