The lights came on.
Cheryl stood in the doorway of her own penthouse, heart still raw from the drive home, eyes still carrying the weight of everything the night had handed her — and there was her father, Luis Andrés Montoya Vélez, sitting in the armchair by the window like he had been there for hours. Because he probably had been.
"Where have you been," he said. It was not a question.
Cheryl set her bag down slowly. "Out."
He stood. And then he looked at her — really looked, the way he did when he was cataloguing every detail — and his jaw tightened. "You've been drinking."
"I'm home. I'm safe. I'm standing in front of you."
"You are here," he said, his voice dropping into that register she knew, the one that meant he was holding something large very carefully, "because I need to keep an eye on you. Because this is not Bogotá and you don't know these streets and you don't know these people and if someone had seen you tonight — if someone recognized who you are, who I am — do you understand what that looks like? Do you understand the kind of scandal—"
"I don't care about a scandal." The words came out before she could measure them, and once they were out she didn't take them back. "I don't care, Papá. Not tonight."
Something shifted in the room.
Cheryl felt it — felt everything she had been holding since the parking lot, since the phone call, since the Porsche in the driveway, since every birthday seat left empty and every gift that arrived in place of him — rise to the surface all at once and she was so tired of pushing it back down.
"My whole life," she said, and her voice was steady in the way that things were steady right before they broke, "I have lived by your rules. Every event, every appearance, every careful correct thing you needed me to be — I did it. I never complained. I transferred out of Uniandes without making a scene. I packed my life into suitcases and came here because you asked me to." She looked at him. "And then you call me from a parking lot to tell me it's a year. A year, Papá. And there is a car in my driveway."
"Cheryl—"
"You didn't ask me. You didn't warn me. You made the decision and sent a Porsche and expected that to be enough." Her voice cracked on the last word and she hated it, hated that her eyes were filling, hated that she couldn't have this conversation without her body betraying how much it hurt. "If you respected my choices — if you actually respected me — we wouldn't even be here."
Luis Andrés was very still.
"Sometimes," she said quietly, "I wish Mamá was here."
The room went completely silent.
She watched something move across her father's face — a fracture, fast and deep, there and then gone, replaced by something harder. When he spoke his voice had changed.
"You think I don't?" The words came out low and tight. "You think there is a single day I don't wish she was here? I am doing everything — everything in my power — to keep you safe. To make sure you don't end up—" He stopped. Swallowed. "I cannot lose you too, Sofia. I cannot stand in the world without you in it. So yes. I make decisions. I keep you close. I do whatever it takes because the alternative is something I refuse to think about."
Cheryl looked at her father — at the lines around his eyes that hadn't been there five years ago, at the way he was holding himself like a man bracing against something only he could feel — and felt the grief of it move through her like a current. She understood. She had always understood.
It still wasn't enough.
"Then try better," she said softly. "Because right now your best isn't reaching me."
She turned to leave. Then stopped.
She reached into her bag and pulled out the Porsche keys. Held them out toward him without turning around. "I think this belongs to you," she said. "Your gifts can't buy my happiness, Papá. They never could."
She set the keys on the side table and walked upstairs.
***
She didn't make it to her room.
María was on the landing — she must have heard everything, or enough of it — and the moment Cheryl saw her the last of her composure came apart completely. María opened her arms and Cheryl walked into them without a word and stood there on the stairs and sobbed, properly, the kind of crying that had been building all day and possibly longer than that.
"You're okay," María said, quietly, her hand moving in slow circles on Cheryl's back. "You're okay, mija."
Cheryl didn't answer. She just held on.
Eventually María pulled back and looked at her face and nodded once — the nod that meant she had seen what she needed to see and knew what to do next. "Go to bed," she said. "I'll bring you water."
Cheryl went upstairs.
Below her, she heard the quiet sound of María going back down to the living room, and then the low murmur of voices — María and her father, talking through the night the way they sometimes did when things had gotten to a point that sleep wasn't coming anyway. She fell asleep to the distant sound of it, which was, in its own way, the closest thing to comfort the night had left to offer.
***
She smelled breakfast before she was fully awake.
Not María's breakfast — María made things methodically, efficiently, the kitchen a machine she operated. This was different. Something slightly uncertain about it, the smell of eggs that had been watched too carefully, toast that had been checked on twice.
Cheryl came downstairs to find Luis Andrés Montoya Vélez standing at her stove with a dish towel over his shoulder, and María standing nearby in the way of someone who had been providing quiet guidance for the past forty minutes.
He looked up when she came in. Something moved across his face — careful, uncertain, the expression of a man who governed an entire department with absolute authority and had absolutely no idea what to do with his daughter the morning after a fight.
"Good morning," he said.
Cheryl looked at the stove. At him. At María, who gave her nothing.
"Good morning," she said. She crossed to the fridge, took out the milk, picked up her bag from the counter where she'd left it. She looked at her father once more — at the breakfast he had gotten up early to make, at the dish towel, at the hope he was trying not to show on his face.
She felt it. She would deal with it later.
"I have class," she said, and walked out.
Sebastián was waiting downstairs with the Range Rover keys. She took them without a word and drove herself.
***
Professor Haines looked up when Cheryl came through the door and said, without missing a beat: "Ms. Montoya Vélez. You're early today."
"Apparently I'm capable of it," Cheryl said, and took her seat.
The day passed without incident, which after the previous twenty-four hours felt almost suspicious. No Liam confrontations. No calls from her father. No puddles. She moved through her classes and her campus with the focused quiet of someone who had decided, for today at least, to simply exist without anything catching fire.
She was not ready to go home.
The library was the obvious answer — large, quiet, and sufficiently far from the penthouse that she could justify still being there at seven in the evening if she needed to. She found a table near the back, spread her notes out, and had been working for almost two hours when the commotion started.
It began as a smell.
Sharp, chemical, wrong — the kind of smell that didn't belong in a library and registered somewhere below conscious thought as a warning before her brain had fully caught up. Then someone shouted from the floor above, and then the fire alarm split the air open, and then everything happened at once.
Students moved for the exits in the fast, uneven way of people who hadn't decided yet whether this was real. Cheryl grabbed her bag and joined the current toward the main doors — and then stopped.
The doors didn't open.
She tried again. Pushed harder. Around her two other students were doing the same thing, their faces shifting from irritated to alarmed. The system had jammed — doors sealed, alarm screaming, smoke beginning to curl down from the upper floor where a group of students had apparently decided that smuggling chemical substances from the science lab into the library was a reasonable decision.
Cheryl turned. Scanned the room. Windows — there, along the far wall, large enough.
She was moving toward them when she saw him.
Liam Caldwell was on the floor between two reading tables, unconscious, one arm stretched toward a bag he hadn't reached. The smoke was thicker near the ground. She didn't think about it — she was already moving, already crouching beside him, shaking his shoulder hard.
"Caldwell." Nothing. "Liam." She shook him harder. "Liam, get up. Right now."
His eyes opened — unfocused, then snapping into awareness as the alarm and the smoke registered together. He pushed himself upright and she had her hand on his arm before he'd fully processed what was happening.
"Window," she said. "Now."
She grabbed a chair and put it through the glass in one motion. The fresh air hit them both like a wall. It was a drop — manageable, not nothing — and she looked at him once.
"Go," she said.
He went. She followed.
They landed hard on the grass below and Cheryl felt the impact travel up through her palms and knees, felt the sting of the glass cuts she hadn't noticed making. She sat up. Liam was beside her, breathing fast, looking at his hands like he was checking they were still there. Around them the campus had erupted — students pouring from other exits, someone screaming, sirens already audible in the distance.
She watched the panic drain slowly from his eyes as the reality of outside air and solid ground settled over him. He turned and looked at her — and for a moment, just a moment, Liam Caldwell looked like neither the class president nor the chancellor's son nor the guy who hadn't apologized for the puddle. He just looked like someone who had been genuinely frightened and was sitting next to the person who had pulled him out of it.
The ambulances arrived. The fire service arrived. Luis Andrés Montoya Vélez arrived — which told Cheryl everything about how quickly news traveled when your father had people watching — and was at her side before the paramedic had finished checking her cuts, his hand on her face, his voice asking questions she answered in monosyllables.
She wasn't indifferent to his worry. She just didn't have the words for it yet.
She followed him to the car. They drove home in silence.
***
The penthouse felt different at night after something like that — too quiet, too still, the kind of silence that made the earlier noise feel louder by contrast. The school was all over the news. María had seen it before they'd even walked through the door and she pulled Cheryl into a hug that lasted longer than usual, then looked over Cheryl's shoulder at Luis Andrés. He shook his head slightly. María nodded.
Cheryl passed them both and went upstairs.
She sat on her bed and looked at her phone — screen cracked clean across the middle, a spiderweb fracture she didn't remember happening, sometime between the chair and the window and the drop. She pressed the home button. It flickered on.
Seventeen missed calls. Beryl. Peryl. Beryl again. Peryl again. The timestamps stretched back hours.
Her girls had seen the news and she hadn't answered and they were somewhere in Colombia completely unable to reach her and she could picture exactly what that felt like because she would have done the same thing.
She pressed call.
It rang once.
"CHERYL SOFIA MONTOYA VÉLEZ—"
"I'm okay," she said quickly. "I'm okay. I'm home. I'm okay."
Silence on the line. Then Beryl's voice, very quietly: "We saw the news."
"I know."
"There was a fire. At your school. And you weren't answering—"
"My phone screen cracked. I couldn't see the calls coming in." She exhaled. "I'm okay. I promise."
Another silence. Then Peryl: "Who pulled you out?"
Cheryl paused.
"I pulled someone out, actually," she said.
"Who?"
She looked at the cracked screen. At the spiderweb fracture cutting across the light.
"Liam Caldwell," she said.
The silence that followed was a different kind entirely.
If you're enjoying Love On Borrowed Time, don't forget to throw some power stones! 🗿 Every stone keeps Cheryl's story going. See you in Chapter Five. 💛