“It’s your father.” Eduardo cut straight to the chase. “He’s awake.”
They left me alone with him.
My father wasn’t up for seeing a crowd, so Dr. Cruz forced everyone else to stay in the hall while I…well, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.
I’d run out of things to say to him a long time ago.
Nevertheless, I came up to his bedside, my heart thumping to an anxious beat when dark eyes latched onto mine.
“Xavier.”
His paper-thin whisper sent a chill down my spine. The last time I saw him, he could speak normally and I could pretend the status quo was still intact. Even if the status quo sucked, there was comfort in familiarity.
But this? I didn’t know what to make of this man or situation. Should I forgive and forget because he was terminally ill? Did the last moments of his life erase the moments of mine that he’d made a living hell? What did a son say to the parent he was supposed to love but hated?
“Father.” I forced a smile. It presented as a grimace.
His rheumy gaze traveled from the top of my sleep-mussed hair to the toes of my sneakers. It ascended to rest on my sweatpants. “Esos pantalones otra vez.” Those pants again.
My jaw clenched. Of course our first interaction in months revolved around his disapproval of my choices. The status quo lives and breathes.
“You know me.” I pushed a hand into my pocket and tossed out a careless smile. “I aim to displease.”
“You’re the Castillo heir,” he snapped in Spanish. “Act like it, especially…” A fit of coughs rattled his lungs. When they finally died down, he inhaled a wheezing breath before continuing. “Especially when I’ll be gone within the week.”
The hand in my pocket fisted. It was the first time my father had ever acknowledged his mortality, and it took every ounce of willpower not to flinch.
“We’ve had this conversation multiple times,” I said. “I’m not taking over the company.”
“Then what are you going to do? Live off my money forever? Raise another…” He coughed again. “Raise another crop of degenerates who’ll turn the family fortune into nothing?”
The monitors beeped with his increased heart rate.
“Grow up, Xavier,” he said harshly. “It’s time for you…” This time, a hacking cough took him out of commission for a full minute. “It’s time for you to be useful for once.”
“You want me, someone who doesn’t want the job and will never want the job, to be CEO? You’re supposed to have good business sense, Father, but even I can tell you that’s not a sound strategy.”
His cough morphed into a phlegmy laugh. “You? CEO of the Castillo Group as you are now? No. I would be better off putting Lupe’s dog in charge.” My father’s eyes slid to the closed door. “Eduardo will train you. This is your legacy.”
My hand ached from the force of my grip. “No, it’s not. It’s yours.”
Perhaps it was crass to argue with a dying man, but this was what our relationship was like to the very end: him trying to force me into a mold I didn’t fit into; me resisting.
There’d been a time when I tried. Before my mom died, I soaked up all my time with him, whether that was at a fútbol game or in his office. I lived for the dreams, the pats on the head, the bonding over a shared future. I was going to carry on the family legacy, and we were going to rule the world.
That was before we became the villains in each other’s stories. “Yours or mine, it’s all the same.” My father’s mouth twisted, the thought as appealing to him as it was to me.
I stared out the window at the gardens. Beyond them lay the rest of Bogotá, and Colombia, and the world.
In our household, tradition formed a prison in which no change entered and no member escaped. I’d come the closest, but a yoke of fear tethered me to the grounds the way a curse tethered spirits to the mortal plane.
I’d been here for one day, and I was already suffocating. I needed a breath of fresh air. Just one.
“Your mother left you a letter.” Six words. One sentence.
That was all it took to obliterate my defenses.
My attention snapped back to the bed, where satisfaction filled my father’s smile. Physically weak though he may be, he was back in control, and he knew it.
“She wrote it when you were born,” he said, each word tumbling through me like boulders in an avalanche. “She wanted to give it to you on your twenty-first birthday.”
Static crackled in my ears until the implications of what he was saying crashed down around me and detonated. Mushroom clouds billowed into the air, robbing me of breath.
Everything of hers had been destroyed in the fire—photos, clothing, mementos. Anything that could’ve reminded me of her, gone.
But if she wrote me a letter…my father wouldn’t have mentioned it unless it was intact. And if it was intact, it meant a piece of her lived on.
I swallowed the emotion burning in my throat. “It’s far past my twenty-first birthday.”
“I didn’t remember it. It was so long ago.” His voice was fading. We didn’t have long before he went under again, but I needed to know about the letter. How had it not burned alongside the rest of her things? Where was it? Most importantly, what was in it?
“She kept it in one of our safes.” Another wheezing breath. “Santos found it when he was tidying up my affairs.”
Santos was our family lawyer.
The safe explained why the letter was intact, but it gave rise to another host of questions.
