Page 108 of The Strength Of A Woman

Her expression shifts.

“It happened way before her death. Right after she and I got married. I couldn’t comprehend why she’d want you to live away from us.”

“It was because of you.”

“Yes, it was,” I admit, although it didn’t make much sense to me back then.

“And yet you did it,” she says. I read her eyes. She continues. “You asked me to leave my home and move here.”

“Yes, I did. And I regret that. Although we probably wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for that. Knowing what I know now about your grandparents, I think it was a good move. It kept you away from that life. They would’ve probably married you to someone else, possibly sooner. Maybe not Varela. But someone just as bad. And I might not have been around.”

She studies me in silence.

“You felt something for me even back then,” she says.

“Your mother’s obstinacy with this whole idea made me curious about this story. About you.”

“I’m talking about when you walked into our house to ask her hand in marriage.”

We both pull our horses to a stop.

“It wasn’t exactly a typical asking of someone’s hand in marriage.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I do.”

“You didn’t look at me.”

“I didn’t look at anyone.”

“Yet you knew exactly what was happening in the room.”

I nod in agreement.

“I liked you from that first moment,” she says.

Her raw sincerity makes something tighten in my chest.

“What could you possibly like about me?”

“The way you carried yourself. You were different than them. That’s what I liked the most. I knew where you came from. Who you were, and all that. I suspected you weren’t there because you had feelings for Bianca. Honestly? No one had feelings for her. And she was just like them––like her men. She also couldn’t feel a thing like her mother and her father. All the feeling stuff had been left to me.”

Her joke is dipped in sadness.

“That aside, you looked real. Like a real man, with good and bad, all in full view. Not like them. I’d studied them my entire life, trying to understand their dynamics and logic. To me, they never made much sense. How could they? They were cardboard characters with no hearts. Everything was a game to them, an act. Their lives were long strings of lies. That’s why they ignored me and tried to use me and put me in a box.”

She’s so serious now that her eyes look like a rainy day.

“You looked different to me, too,” I admit, and her eyes become alight with curiosity.

“Seriously. How?”

“I know fake people when I see them. You were right about them. I hadn’t come to your place expecting real conversations. I was set up, remember? So everything looked like I expected it. You, on the other hand, couldn’t hide your fascination with me and didn’t know how to conceal it. So I knew even back then that you weren’t a puppet. A soulless player. That you somehow got lost in the mix of self-serving interests and ugly stuff I didn’t want to have anything to do with. It wasn’t my place to straighten things out in your family, though.”

“And look at you now,” she says with a smile that brings back the gleeful Leilani.

Her sparkling eyes put a grin on my face.