Cheryl was almost at her car when her phone buzzed.
She looked at the screen. Then she stopped walking.
PAPÁ.
She stood in the parking lot for one breath, two, then answered. "Papá."
"Mija." Luis Andrés Montoya Vélez had a voice built for press conferences and government chambers — deep, measured, the kind that filled a room without effort. Right now it had the particular careful quality he used when he was about to say something he knew she wasn't going to like. "How was your first day?"
"It was fine." She unlocked the car. "What's happened?"
A pause. "The Hargrove deal is more complex than we anticipated. There are additional regulatory frameworks that need to be navigated, new parties at the table, it's going to take longer than we originally planned."
Cheryl put her bag in the passenger seat. "How much longer."
"A year, Sofia."
She went very still. "I'm sorry?"
"Twelve months. Possibly a little more. The team is—"
"A year." She said it back to him flatly, the way you repeated something when your brain needed confirmation that it had heard correctly. "You're telling me we are staying in New Jersey for a year."
"I know this isn't what either of us—"
"Papá." Her voice came out very controlled. The kind of controlled that took effort. "I transferred out of Uniandes. I left Bogotá. I left Beryl and Peryl and my apartment and everything I had there because you said you needed me close and it was going to be a few months—"
"I know, mija. I know, and I'm sorry…"
She hung up.
She sat in the driver's seat for a moment, phone face-down in her lap, looking straight ahead at the parking lot. Then she called Beryl.
"Hey! how was…"
"A year," Cheryl said.
Silence. Then: "Say that again."
"The deal got extended. We're here for a year, Beryl. Twelve months."
"Let me get Peryl." There was shuffling, a muffled Peryl get on the phone right now, and then Peryl's voice came through sharp and immediate: "What happened?"
"His deal got extended. A year. He called me as I was walking to my car and told me we're staying in New Jersey for a year and I…" She exhaled. "I hung up on him."
"You hung up on Luis Andrés Montoya Vélez." Peryl's voice was careful in the way of someone deciding whether to be alarmed or impressed.
"Mid-sentence."
"Okay." A beat. "Okay. We're angry. We're allowed to be angry. This is objectively terrible and he should have…"
"He knew," Beryl said, and her voice had gone quiet and certain. "He had to have had some indication it was going this direction before today. He just waited until you were already there and already settled to tell you."
"I know," Cheryl said. "I know he did."
She drove home angry. Not the loud kind — the low, settled kind that sat in the chest like a stone and didn't move. She let Beryl and Peryl talk because their voices helped, and she let herself feel it without doing anything about it yet, which was the thing María had always told her to do with the feelings she didn't know what to do with. Feel it first. Decide later.
She was three minutes from the penthouse when she saw it.
Parked in the driveway of her building — gleaming, silver, catching the last of the evening light with the quiet arrogance of something that knew exactly how good it looked. It was a Porsche.
Cheryl sat in her car and looked at it.
"There's a Porsche in my driveway," she said into the phone.
Silence on the line.
"A what?" said Peryl.
"A Porsche. Silver. Parked in my spot." She could already feel the shape of what had happened, the exact familiar architecture of it. "He does this every time."
She went upstairs. María was in the kitchen, and she looked up when Cheryl came in with the expression of a woman who had been waiting to have a conversation she hadn't started.
"The Porsche," Cheryl said.
María set down the spoon she was holding. "It arrived this afternoon. Your father arranged it — he thought since you'd be driving yourself, something more…"
"He calls to tell me we're staying for a year," Cheryl said, quietly, setting her bag on the counter, "and he sends a car."
"Cheryl—"
"He has done this my whole life, María. Every time. Every missed birthday, every empty seat, every phone call instead of a presence — there is always something waiting when I get home. Something expensive. Something that's supposed to make the space feel smaller." She looked out the window at the city below. "It doesn't. It never does."
María was quiet for a moment. Then she said, gently: "I know."
"It's still not her," Cheryl said. "No matter what he sends. It's still not her."
She picked up her phone and went to her room.
"Okay," she told Beryl and Peryl, dropping onto her bed, staring at the ceiling. "He sent a Porsche."
A pause. Then Peryl said, very carefully: "A Porsche."
"Silver. Parked in my driveway."
Another pause. Then Beryl, in the tone of a woman conducting a cost-benefit analysis in real time: "Cheryl. I love you. And I am furious on your behalf, genuinely, about the year. Truly. But—" She stopped.
"Say it," Cheryl said.
"A Porsche isn't that bad."
Cheryl pressed her hand over her eyes. "Beryl."
"I'm just saying what we're all thinking!" Peryl jumped in. "He's wrong. He's absolutely wrong for extending this without warning and he should have told you sooner and the gift thing is a whole separate conversation — but Cher. It's a Porsche. Go wild on this one."
Cheryl lay there for a long moment, ceiling fan turning slowly above her.
Then, very slowly, something shifted.
If Luis Andrés Montoya Vélez was going to keep her in New Jersey for a year — his decision, his deal, his timeline — then fine. She had done everything correctly her whole life. She had been the governor's composed, careful, well-behaved daughter. She had smiled at the right events and said the right things and transferred universities without making a scene.
He wanted to extend the deal? She could extend herself too. His city. Her terms. His headache.
"You know what," she said, sitting up. "You're right."
"Obviously," said Peryl. "What are you going to do?"
Cheryl looked at the keys on her nightstand — the new ones, the Porsche ones, still in the envelope they'd been delivered in.
"I'm going for a drive," she said.
***
New Jersey at night was a different thing entirely.
Cheryl took the Porsche out with the windows down and the music up and let herself learn the roads the way she'd always learned new cities — by feel, by instinct, taking turns that looked interesting and doubling back when they didn't. The car handled like it had been made specifically for this kind of recklessness, smooth and responsive and entirely too good for the speed limits it was currently ignoring.
She drove until the roads got wider and the lights got brighter, and somewhere in that stretch of lit-up Jersey evening she found herself pulling into the parking lot of a club that pulsed with bass and had a line out the door that she walked straight past.
Inside it was loud and warm and full of people who had no interest in who she was or where she was from, which was exactly what she needed. She found a space on the dance floor and let the music make the decisions for a while, ordered a drink at the bar and then another, and for a stretch of time that felt genuinely necessary she stopped thinking about Princeton and Liam Caldwell and twelve months in New Jersey and her father's voice saying mija like it was supposed to be enough.
She was on her third song and her second drink when she felt it — the particular awareness of being watched. She had grown up in rooms full of people who looked at her father and looked at her by extension, and she knew the feeling the way you knew the weight of a coat you'd worn a hundred times.
She scanned the room without making it obvious.
A group near the far end of the bar. Four guys, easy and unhurried, the kind of comfortable that came from going to places like this often. She moved through them without stopping — and then her eyes landed and stayed.
Liam Caldwell. Jacket off, sleeves pushed up, holding a glass, saying something to the guy beside him. He hadn't seen her yet.
Cheryl looked away immediately and did a slower sweep. Blair was there too — of course she was — standing with Aria and Jade at a table not far from Liam's group, in the specific formation of people pretending to be somewhere independently while being entirely aware of exactly where Liam Caldwell was standing.
Cheryl picked up her drink and thought, with great feeling: could this day be any worse.
She did not go over. She did not make eye contact. She finished her drink, set the glass on the bar, picked up her bag, and left with the same unhurried ease she'd walked in with. She was not running. She was simply done.
***
The drive home was quieter.
She had the music low this time, and somewhere on the road back the evening caught up with her — the call, the Porsche, the club, Liam's face appearing in a crowd like the universe was making a point she hadn't asked for. And underneath all of it, running like a current below everything else, the thought she always eventually arrived at when the day ran out of distractions.
Her mother.
Valentina Vélez, who had been twenty-nine years old and present and then simply not. Cheryl had four years of memories that weren't really memories — more like impressions, warmth without detail, the sense of a presence rather than the presence itself. She didn't know her mother's laugh. Didn't know what she smelled like or what she said when she was frustrated or whether she would have looked at the life Cheryl was living and recognized herself in it.
What she knew was that her father had never recovered. That every gift and every overprotection and every deal extension that kept Cheryl within reach was Luis Andrés trying to hold onto the one thing he had left after Valentina. She knew that. She understood it completely and it broke her heart a little every time she thought about it.
It still hurt. Understanding something didn't stop it from hurting.
She pulled into the building's driveway and sat in the Porsche with the engine off. The city moved around her, indifferent and constant, and she let it. She was in no hurry to go upstairs, no hurry to be inside the penthouse that was beautiful and enormous and felt nothing like home.
She sat for a long time.
Eventually she got out. Took the elevator up. Stood outside her front door for a moment with her key in her hand and the particular exhaustion of a day that had been too many things at once settling fully into her bones.
She pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The lights came on.
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