She doesn’t lift her eyes, her teeth slowly grazing her bottom lip. The tension is painful.
I grip her chin and tilt it up.
“Tell me…” I say, getting lost in her misty eyes. “Why are you talking about your neighbor’s house?”
She chews on her lip for a moment, not in the cute and relaxed kind of way but in the tense, hesitating way.
Her eyes don’t leave mine, and I sense her on the brink of confessing.
“I checked your phone,” she says, her eyes latched onto mine.
Her brazenness makes my skin cold.
I know it’s not for me to pass judgment.
I haven’t been truthful with her, and, in many ways, her snooping around is mostly a consequence of my morally gray actions, but still…
“Why would you do that?”
My hand rests on her neck as I wait for her to answer.
“Because you are so secretive about yourself. Most of the time, anyway.”
I open my mouth to retort when she flicks her hand up, stopping me.
“Before you say anything…” she says. “The only reason I checked your phone was that I had this dreadful feeling your secrets had to do with me.”
She gauges my reaction.
I look at her, poker-faced.
Frankly, I don’t know what to say. She is right. I’ve hidden many things from her. I checked her place in her absence and lied to her without blinking.
I have no right to be angry with her, and she has every right to know what’s going on, but I have nothing to give her.
At this point, it’s all suspicions bred in my long-lasting distrust for my father’s sordid affairs.
What right do I have to dig into her family history? Other than the fact that it may be intertwined with my family history?
What do I know about how she feels about it? What her relationship with her parents was? And what kind of trauma their premature passing has inflicted on her?
Knowing the truth will make things different.
At that point, I will know what I’m dealing with and how to navigate it without losing her.
The last thing I want is for her to think this whole setup was about tricking her into spending more time with me so I could fish for information.
We’d never recover from that.
“What makes you say that?” I ask.
She seems somewhat relieved that I’m open to talking to her about it.
“Everything. Your phone calls. And I’m not talking about your business calls or when Francisco and Alejandro call you. I’m talking about calls that come late at night, and you must take them. And then your expression changes, and I never know how or if it affects your mood and what to expect when you’re done talking. Sometimes you’re distracted, and almost all the time, you’re reserved. And I know it’s not everything about me. And I haven’t been suspicious from the beginning, to be honest, but as of late, I started to think about it. What if there’s something about me in your conversations with other people?”
A pause ensues.
“That’s it?” I murmur.