Chapter Seven: After The Fall
1972 Words
POV: Juliana Alejandro
It had been three days.
Three long, aching, hollow days.
Juliana checked her phone again. Still no reply. No missed calls. No blue ticks. Just silence.
The last message she sent to Leonardo still sat there unread.
Please, let me explain properly. Please don’t hate me.
She’d stared at it for hours, debating whether to delete it. But what would that change?
She hadn’t been to his office. She couldn’t bring herself to face him. Not yet. But she’d seen him.
He passed her in the corridor yesterday, eyes fixed on the path ahead. As if she didn’t exist. As if everything they had shared, that small tenderness, that spark of trust had never happened.
It was the look of someone who had shut the door and locked it from the inside.
At the library, she sat by the far window, her laptop open but untouched. She couldn’t concentrate. Her mind was a reel of painful images.
Leonardo standing in her doorway, frozen.
Nacho’s voice asking, Is that my daddy?
The way Leonardo’s face changed when he heard the word Mama.
The crack in his voice when he whispered, You lied.
It haunted her.
She hadn’t told Tía Rosa what had happened. Her aunt would worry enough. Nacho was stable, but still undergoing tests. The treatment in Mexico had started, but Juliana knew it was only the beginning. She needed Leonardo’s help to keep her son alive. But more than that… she missed him.
Not the professor. Not the man who wrote her checks.
She missed the version of him that showed up in her silence. The man who told her he hadn’t been seen in months, maybe years. She missed the softness that lived underneath all that grief.
The next morning, she woke up with swollen eyes and a sore throat. She hadn’t cried this much in years. But guilt had no mercy. It would follow her through lectures, errands, even dreams.
She forced herself to go to class.
Leonardo stood at the front, calm and crisp as ever. Blue shirt, dark tie, papers neatly aligned on the desk. He looked through his slides like the room was empty.
“Today we begin with literary distortion and narrative ethics,” he said. His voice didn’t crack. “Page ninety-three.”
Juliana sat in the third row. She didn’t raise her hand. She couldn’t. Her notebook was open, but the page stayed blank.
During the lecture, their eyes never met.
Later that afternoon, she stood outside his office for ten minutes.
She didn’t knock. She just stood there, heart pounding, palms sweating.
Finally, she slid a note under the door.
I’m sorry. Not for being a mother, but for not telling you sooner. I was scared. Of everything. I miss how you used to look at me like I was still good. Even if you never speak to me again, please know I’m truly sorry.
She walked away before she could change her mind.
That night, she curled up on the couch in her tiny flat. She stared at the framed photo of Nacho, the one taken on his fifth birthday. He was wearing a superhero cape made out of a pillowcase. His smile was wide, missing two front teeth.
“Mamá, why did you lie?” he had asked so innocently.
She couldn’t stop hearing it.
Day five.
Still no word.
Still no returned calls.
Still no response to her email, her handwritten letter, or the small envelope she left in his campus mailbox with an apology note and a tiny ceramic frog, the same one he once admired on her desk during tutoring.
She felt like a ghost. Like her apology was floating around in the air with nowhere to land.
Then came the thunderstorm.
It rolled in on a Saturday night, pounding Brighton with thick clouds and wind that howled like grief itself.
Juliana sat by her window, watching rain smear the glass. She pressed her forehead to the cool pane and let her mind drift.
She thought of the night she kissed him. The softness of it. The way his eyes didn’t harden.
She thought of the way he walked out without another word.
She had betrayed the only person who had shown her kindness without asking anything in return.
And she didn’t know if she’d ever get a chance to make it right.
On Sunday, she tried one last time.
She walked through the university garden, down the back hallway, and stood outside his office.
The light was on.
She hesitated. Then, with a deep breath, she knocked once.
No answer.
She knocked again.
Silence.
She turned the knob.
It was open.
She stepped in, slowly.
Leonardo sat at his desk, papers spread out in front of him. He didn’t look up.
Juliana’s voice trembled. “I didn’t come to beg.”
He didn’t move.
“I just came to say thank you. For everything. For helping me. For caring when you didn’t have to. I’m sorry I didn’t give you the full truth. I was scared, and maybe selfish.”
Still nothing.
She took a step closer.
“You’re right. You were beginning to heal. And I ruined that. I hate myself for it.”
Leonardo finally looked up.
His eyes were tired. And sad.
“I don’t hate you, Juliana.”
That hit harder than anger.
“I’m just… disappointed,” he said.
She nodded, tears filling her eyes. “I understand.”
“You had so many chances to tell me. Even after I gave you the money. I thought… you respected me enough to be honest.”
“I did,” she whispered.
“You didn’t.”
He said it calmly. Like a fact, not an insult.
Juliana stepped back.
“I’ll go.”
She turned to leave.
Then he said, quietly, “I read your note.”
She stopped.
Leonardo stood slowly. “I don’t know what to do with it yet. But I read it.”
Juliana turned, eyes wet. “Does that mean you’ll talk to me again?”
Leonardo looked at her for a long time. Then he said, “I need time.”
She nodded. “Take it. Take all of it.”
That night, she lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. Not in fear, but in quiet understanding.
She had broken something. And sometimes, when things break, they don’t return to what they were.
But sometimes, if you’re patient, they come back differently. Softer. Wiser. And still whole.
- Writer
