CHAPTER FIVE. Shadows on the pier
1502 Words
Estefe lay stomach-down across her bed, phone propped against a pillow, legs kicked up behind her like a kid at a sleepover instead of a college freshman with a boyfriend, and grinned at the ceiling every time Mason's voice came through the speaker.
"You're impossible," she said, laughing. "You know that, right?"
"I've been told. Usually by you."
"I mean it as a compliment. Mostly." She twisted a strand of hair around her finger. "Okay, tell me the sweetest thing you'd do for a girlfriend. Hypothetically."
"Hypothetically," Mason said, and she could hear the smile in his voice, "I'd probably learn her coffee order down to the syrup pump count and just show up with it. No occasion. Just Tuesday."
"That's disgustingly cute."
"I have my moments."
Estefe rolled onto her back, phone against her ear, chest full in a way that made her reckless. "I love you," she said, easy as breathing, the words out before she'd even fully decided to say them.
There was a pause. Half a beat too long.
"You're something else, Reyes," Mason said finally, warm, deflecting, and Estefe — high on the sound of his voice and the particular giddiness of a girl a month into her first real relationship — didn't notice the words he hadn't said back. She'd told herself, when he'd asked her out a month ago, that liking someone was close enough to the beginning of love that the exact vocabulary didn't matter yet. She had no way of knowing that when Mason told her he liked her that night, he had chosen the word carefully, deliberately, because the other one was a lie he hadn't yet decided he was willing to tell.
"Our monthaversary's in a week," she said instead, sitting up, already planning. "I was thinking the pier, or—"
"Sounds great." Mason's voice had gone flatter, distracted, like a man checking his watch mid-sentence. "Hey, I've gotta run, my mom's calling. Talk tomorrow?"
"Oh — sure. Love you," she said again, and the line went quiet a second before he said, "Night, Estefe," and hung up.
She sat there a moment, phone dark in her hand, and told herself it was nothing.
The maid knocked twice before letting herself in. "Dinner's ready, Miss Estefe."
Downstairs, the Reyes dining table was set the way it always was on weeknights — candles George insisted on even for takeout, Ava already seated with a folder of quarterly reports she'd promised, and failed, not to bring to the table.
"How was the exam?" George asked.
"Brutal. I think I did fine." Estefe reached for the bread basket. "Dad, can I ask you something about the Miami expansion? For a marketing case study."
George brightened instantly — he loved nothing more than being asked — and the conversation dissolved into the easy, familiar rhythm of a family that, whatever its other complications, genuinely liked each other's company. Estefe did not mention Mason. She hadn't, not once in a month, because Mason had asked her — gently, reasonably, let's keep it between us for now, I don't want your parents' first impression of me to be some public thing before I've even properly met them — and Estefe, charmed and unsuspicious, had agreed without questioning it twice.
Across town, Sara sat cross-legged on her narrow bed with a corporate law casebook open across her knees when a knock came at her door.
"You've been in here for four hours," said Priya, one of her hostel-mates, leaning in the doorway with two mugs of instant coffee. She attended the community college across town rather than Bellamar, which made her, in Sara's experience, one of the only people in her life who had zero opinion about Estefe Reyes or the Beltrán family or anything happening on Bellamar's campus at all — a relief Sara hadn't known she needed until she had it.
"Studying," Sara said, accepting the mug gratefully.
"For fun, or because the world will end if you don't?"
"Bit of both." Sara smiled, and for twenty minutes let herself talk about nothing that mattered — Priya's terrible boss, a movie neither of them had seen, anything except the strange new world of the elites and boys, one who looked at her like a liability and the other who was incredibly nice and seemed cool. It was, she thought later, one of the easiest conversations she'd had in weeks.
Nick's dinner that night was quieter.
"Val, elbows," Camila said automatically, and Val straightened up, unbothered.
"Nick, Sara's actually kind of cool," Val announced apropos of nothing. "I liked her."
"Mm," Nick said, uninterested, pushing rice around his plate.
"You mean that girl Estefe introducd me to at the party?" "Yes mom" Val says. "She seems nice" Camila said mildly, watching her son over the rim of her water glass.
"Can we not talk about her?." Nick says to them.
Alright. Camilla says and chooses to change the topic.
Setting her fork down while looking at her kids but more at Nick who was looking down at his food. "Your father's in town this week. He'd like to see you both."
The temperature at the table dropped by several degrees.
"No," Nick said, Now looking up at her
"Nicolás—"
"I'm not interested, Mom. I don't know why you keep asking me this like the answer's going to change." His voice was rising now, sharper than he probably intended. "He left. He built a whole new life with a whole new family and barely looked back, and now he wants to swing through town for a weekend and play dad? He doesn't deserve an hour of my time, let alone yours."
The silence that followed was absolute. Val's fork clattered against her plate, and when Nick looked over, her eyes were already brimming.
"So it's true," she said, small and shaking. "He doesn't love us?"
"Val—" Camila started, but Val was already up, chair scraping back, running from the table toward the stairs.
Nick found her curled on her bed a minute later, face buried in her pillow.
"I didn't mean for you to hear that," he said quietly, sitting beside her.
"Is it true, though?" She looked up, tear-streaked. "That he doesn't love us?"
He pulled her into a hug, chin resting on top of her head. "He doesn't deserve us, Val. That's different. We're better off without him — I promise you that." He said it with total conviction, the kind that came from years of practice believing it himself, and didn't see his mother standing silent in the doorway, watching her two children console each other over a wound she hadn't been able to prevent, tears sliding silently down her own face before she turned and walked quietly back downstairs, unseen.
A week later, Estefe was laughing at something Sara had said, walking arm in arm across the pier boardwalk, when Sara steered them, with suspicious purpose, toward a stretch of railing strung with fairy lights and white roses.
"Wait, why are we—"
Mason stepped out from behind the flower stand, a bouquet in hand, and Estefe's whole face broke open with delight before he'd said a single word.
"Happy anniversary, babe." He kissed her, slow and sure, and pressed the flowers into her hands.
"Aww — you remembered." Estefe kissed him back, glowing, then turned, startled, to find Sara and Nick both standing a few feet off, clearly not surprised at all. "Wait — you guys knew?"
"I found out this morning," Sara said, smiling. "Wanted to be part of it."
"He swore me to secrecy Tuesday," Nick added dryly. "Under duress."
"I thought you'd forgotten," Estefe admitted to Mason once the others had drifted a polite distance away. "Last week you sounded like you weren't even that into it."
"How could I forget us?" Mason said, and the words landed exactly as warm and certain as he needed them to, a performance so smooth even he sometimes forgot, for whole minutes at a time, that it was one.
A little further down the pier, Sara noticed Nick watching Estefe and Mason with an expression he clearly thought no one could see — something unguarded, something almost wounded.
"Hey," she said, coming to stand beside him.
"Hey," he said, without a smile, looking quickly away and busying himself with a passing tray of appetizers he hadn't actually wanted.
"I noticed you looking at Estefe just now."
"Would you mind your own business." He didn't raise his voice, but the words came out clipped, final, and he walked off toward the water before she could say anything else — leaving Sara standing alone at the railing, watching his back, and turning over, for the first time, a suspicion she wasn't at all sure she wanted to be right about.
Behind her, unnoticed by any of them, a familiar black Range Rover idled at the far end of the pier parking lot, its passenger window cracked exactly two inches.
- Writer
