“But you were there for a year?” I asked, staring at her and waiting for her to continue. For her to tell me that she hadn’t been the other woman in a marriage.
“It wasn’t a marriage built on love. There were no feelings between them, so I agreed to remain his mistress. After a few months passed, he came to see me less, until the visits stopped altogether or remained platonic in nature. Like visiting a friend, when months before he hadn’t been able to keep his hands off me,” she said, pausing to reach across the counter to take my hand in hers. All the judgment I’d felt for my relationship with Rafe made me refuse to squeeze her hand back.
At least I hadn’t been involved with a married man.
“He ended it?” I asked, swallowing around the nausea in my throat as I pulled my hand back. I tried not to judge, tried to keep the shock off my face knowing that everything I'd believed about my mother and her stringent beliefs had been a deception. Or, at the very least, hadn’t always been what she thought.
“He ended it. He said he fell in love with his wife as he got to know her and that he’d come clean about our relationship. She would forgive him for what he did, so long as he never saw me again. Martina was pregnant—”
“Where in Spain was this?” I asked, my heart stalling in my chest as the familiar name erupted through the room. Joaquin’s head shot up at the table, his eyes intense on mine as I turned my shocked eyes to his to be sure it hadn’t been a figment of my imagination. Martina was a common enough name, but the odds seemed impossible. “Where, Mom?”
“Barcelona,” she replied, staring back and forth between Joaquin and I.
“What was his name?” Joaquin asked, standing from his seat and closing the distance between us. His hands hit the island counter, leaning into her space and waiting for her to give him the answer we both knew was coming with rising dread.
“Andrés,” she whispered. “Ibarra is a very common name. It seemed impossible that they would be related, but they are. Aren’t they?” she asked, placing her head in her hands.
“Andrés is Rafael’s uncle,” I said, leaning my ass into the stove behind me.
“This isn’t where I thought this conversation was going. I didn’t come here to warn you off his family. I just wanted you to understand that even good men falter. They aren’t always loyal and you can’t trust that your husband will be faithful to you. Andrés was a good man who made a mistake, but it didn’t change what it did to his wife when she found out the truth. I don’t want that for you,” she said, rubbing a hand over her face.
I couldn’t even think of the implications of what the new information meant for my family going forward or about how intertwined our pasts truly were. “Did you ever meet Miguel Ibarra? This is very,veryfucking important. I couldn’t care less about your affair with Andrés right now, but this matters,” I said, leaning forward and taking her hand in mine.
She nodded hesitantly, her eyes glancing toward where Joaquin watched with wide eyes. “Andrés and I ended on good terms even though I was hurt, but his brother thought I knew too much. He wanted Andrés to keep me in the family and offered to take over my care.” She paused, swallowing down whatever surge of emotion came from remembering a conversation where she was talked about like a pet. “I wasn’t interested. I just wanted to come home, so Andrés snuck me out of the country and that was that. I never saw either of them again.”
“But I did,” I said. Joaquin pulled the cell from his pocket, unlocking the screen and calling Rafe as he paced back and forth in the room. There was no answer, unsurprisingly. The twisted fucker was probably covered in blood, busy interrogating Timofey once again. What he hoped to learn from a man that had to be barely alive at this point, I didn’t care to know.
He just needed to answer his damn phone.
“Who is Miguel to Rafael?” my mother asked, blinking back her shock. “Is he his father?”
“He was. He died a few years ago,” I said, watching as Joaquin typed furiously on his phone—presumably a frantic text to Rafael to call him immediately. “But not before he threw Odina and me into the Chicago River.”
My mother’s eyes widened, her shock palpable in the air as Joaquin’s ringtone erupted in the room. He answered, stalking to the doorway that went to the foyer and speaking rapidly in Spanish without pause. “Miguel Ibarra threw you in the river?” my mother asked, swallowing as she touched a hand to her chest. “But why?”
“That’s what we’ve been trying to figure out,” I murmured, sliding the lemonade closer to her to encourage her to take a sip. I moved around the island, taking the stool next to hers and sliding onto it slowly. “Is there anything else you know? Anything that might explain why he came back after all those years?”
“I wasnobodyto Miguel. I only ever met him a few times. He terrified me, Isa. If that man is Rafael’s father, then you’re in danger. Andrés told me stories about the things his brother was capable of so that I knew to keep my distance. You wouldn’t believe—”
“Mom,” I sighed, taking her hands in mine and guiding her to face me. “I know exactly what kind of man Miguel was, and I know the kind of man my husband is. Rafael may be a far cry from perfect, but he is not Miguel.”
“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” she groaned, rolling her eyes as if I was being naive.
“If that were true, Odina and I would be like you. We’d be more happy to have quiet lives and go to college and do what is expected of us. We wouldn’t be consumed by this darkness inside of us and desperate for adventure,” I explained.
“You think I wasn’t? You think I went to Spain on my own and fell in love with a man like Andrés Ibarra because I craved safety and comfort?” She scoffed, turning her face away from mine and finally taking a sip of her lemonade. “I was just like you two, and look where that got me! With a broken heart, shipped out in the night so a madman couldn’t claim ownership of me, only for him to come back and try to drown my daughters years later.”
I recognized the signs of guilt weighing in, the way her shoulders sagged under the realization that her choices all those years ago had been what led to Odina and I ending up in that river.
With it came the realization that clenched my heart in my chest, making my eyes sting with the tears of what I hadn’t wanted to see. This guilt was different than what I’d thought she felt before.
This guilt was hers to carry, and not just the shadow of the blame she’d shifted onto my shoulders.
All my life, I’d thought she catered to Odina because she felt guilty for the way her choice had affected her. Instead, she’d given my sister everything she needed because she blamed me for the decision I’d made that day.
Rafael had been right. He’d seen the truth in my mother’s actions when I’d been too close to them. “Miguel Ibarra did whatever he wanted and didn’t care who it affected,” I said. “If you didn’t feel guilty about your affair with Andrés before today, then you shouldn’t now. Nothing has changed.”
Regardless of whether we’d known it, her affair had to have been the driving force that led to the events that shaped the rest of our lives, but that had been true the day before too. “I was so mad at you,” she murmured, squeezing my hand in hers. “For going with him that day. How many times had I told you not to talk to strangers? I was so grateful you were alive, but still so mad at you.”
“I know,” I said back, nodding my head as Joaquin stepped back into the room. “But I forgive you for it. I just hope you can find a way to forgive me for that mistake. I’ve stopped expecting it of Odina, but it took me a long time to realize I still needed to hope for it from you.”
She leaned forward, wrapping her arms around me and tugging me off the stool until she crushed my head to her shoulder and kissed my forehead. “Of course I forgive you, Isa. I should have forgiven you a long time ago,” she said, sniffling back tears as Joaquin watched the interaction with a soft smile on his face.
I bit my lip to stifle the emotion threatening to make my lip tremble. We had a first hint about why Miguel had bothered with me in the first place, and I finally felt closure over my choice that day.
It never would have mattered what choice I made, because all roads would have led me right to that moment in the kitchen.
Rafael and I had always been inevitable.