The same guy," Cheryl said, "who splashed water on me on my first day."
The silence on the line lasted exactly two seconds before Beryl's voice came through with the energy of someone who had been waiting her whole life to say something.
"If that were me," Beryl said, "he would not be alive right now."
Cheryl burst out laughing — the real kind, the kind that came from somewhere below the chest and took everything else with it. "You're evil."
"I'm practical."
"She's absolutely evil," Peryl confirmed cheerfully from her end of the call. "But also not wrong."
"You're both terrible," Cheryl said, still laughing, lying back against her pillow. It felt good — the laughing, the voices, the familiar rhythm of the three of them together even across an ocean. She hadn't realized how much she'd needed it until it was happening.
A knock at her bedroom door.
"One second." She lowered the phone. "Come in."
The door opened. Luis Andrés stood in the frame — still in the clothes he'd been wearing downstairs, looking at her with the careful expression of a man who had rehearsed something and was hoping he'd gotten it right.
"I'll call you both back," Cheryl said into the phone.
"Tell him we said hi," Peryl said.
"Tell him Beryl would like a word about fire safety," Beryl added.
Cheryl hung up before either of them could say anything else and sat up on the bed. Luis Andrés came in and pulled the chair from her desk close, and for a moment they just sat — father and daughter, in the quiet of a penthouse in New Jersey, with a whole day's worth of things between them that neither had finished saying.
"I was scared," he said. Not the governor's voice this time — just his. "When I heard the school was on fire. Before I knew you were out — those minutes, Cheryl. Those minutes were—" He stopped. Shook his head.
"I know, Papá."
"And I know I haven't been available the way I should be. I know the deal, the extension — I know you deserved more warning and more consideration and I failed that." He looked at his hands for a moment. "But I love you. I need you to know that underneath every wrong decision and every gift that missed the point — it is all love. Every bit of it."
Cheryl looked at her father. At the man who had stood at a stove this morning with a dish towel over his shoulder and hope on his face. At the man who had appeared at the ambulance before the paramedics were done, his hand on her face, asking if she was okay in a voice that didn't sound like a governor at all.
She leaned over and hugged him.
He held on like she was something he'd almost lost, which she supposed, in a way, she had been.
After a while he pulled back, and she saw him trying to find his way back to solid ground — the shift that happened when Luis Andrés Montoya Vélez decided a moment had gotten emotional enough and it was time to restore some dignity to the proceedings.
"You know," he said, clearing his throat, "in thirty years of negotiations I have never once been this nervous." He looked at her. "This has genuinely been the biggest and most terrifying contract negotiation of my entire career."
Cheryl laughed — surprised out of it, which she suspected was the point. "Did you just compare making up with your daughter to a business deal?"
"I compared it to the most high-stakes business deal of my life." He straightened his jacket with great dignity. "My big baby is all grown up and apparently she negotiates harder than the Hargrove team." He kissed the top of her head and stood. "Get some sleep."
She listened to his footsteps retreat down the hall, and then she lay back on her bed and looked at the ceiling and let the day settle over her.
Twenty-four hours. She had been at Princeton for barely more than twenty-four hours and she had been soaked on a curb, argued in a lecture, discovered she was staying for a year, taken a Porsche for a reckless drive, spotted Liam Caldwell at a club, cried on a staircase, survived a library fire, broken a window with a chair, and made up with her father.
She thought about what Beryl had said — he would not be alive right now — and laughed quietly at the ceiling.
Then she thought about Liam on the floor between the tables, the way his eyes had snapped open when she shook him. The way he'd looked outside after, sitting on the grass with his hands in front of him, the panic draining out of his face. He had looked — stripped of the class president composure, stripped of the chancellor's son armor — completely human. Unexpectedly so.
She thought about the line of his jaw in that unguarded moment.
She sat up straight.
"Get a grip," she told herself firmly, out loud, to the empty room. "Absolutely not."
She turned off the light and went to sleep.
***
The kitchen the next morning was a different thing entirely.
The energy had shifted — she felt it before she even reached the bottom of the stairs. There were sounds of actual movement, the clink of plates being set, and when she came through the doorway she found Luis Andrés and María at the breakfast table with the focused cooperation of people who had clearly been at this for a while. Her father was smiling. Not the careful diplomatic smile he used for press conferences — the real one, the one that made him look about ten years younger.
"You're cooking again," Cheryl said.
"I am," he confirmed, with the tone of a man extremely pleased with himself.
She looked at the spread on the table. Then at him. "The only reason I didn't eat your food yesterday," she said, pulling out her chair, "was because you are a genuinely terrible cook and I was not prepared to survive a library fire only to be taken out by your eggs."
María made a sound that was definitely a laugh disguised as a cough.
Luis Andrés turned slowly from the stove. "María." His voice was dangerously calm.
"Mm?" said María, studying the orange juice.
"You're in on this too."
"I have no idea what you mean."
He set the plate down in front of Cheryl and pulled out his own chair with great dignity. "Try it," he said. "Go on. Because this may very well be the last time you eat a signature dish from me at this price — which is free — before I become famous and you're paying restaurant rates."
"Ha," said Cheryl. "Ha ha, Dad."
She picked up her fork. Took a bite. Chewed.
It was — and she was going to take this to her grave — genuinely good. Properly good. She kept her face entirely neutral.
"Well?" he said.
"It's fine," she said. "It's edible. You've achieved edible."
Luis Andrés looked at María. María looked at the orange juice. Cheryl ate her breakfast and said nothing further, which was its own kind of answer.
He insisted on dropping her at school, which she agreed to on one condition.
"I'm driving," she said.
He considered this. "Fine."
She drove. He sat in the passenger seat of the Range Rover with the composure of a man pretending he was not gripping the door handle at her first lane change and they made it to Princeton without incident. He said goodbye at the curb — a proper goodbye this time, not a phone call, not a gift — and she took her bag and walked toward the building.
She glanced back once. He was still standing there, watching her go, and when she caught his eye he straightened his jacket and turned toward the campus buildings with the purposeful stride of a man who absolutely had not just been standing there watching his daughter walk away.
She smiled to herself and went to class.
***
She was arranging her notes when she felt someone stop at her row.
She looked up. Liam Caldwell was standing there — no group behind him this time, no Blair and Aria and Jade positioned like a backdrop, just him — looking at her with an expression she hadn't seen on him before. Straightforward. Unguarded.
"Thank you," he said. "For yesterday. I mean it."
Cheryl looked at him for a moment. "It was nothing," she said. "Anyone would have—"
"Not everyone did." He held her gaze. "So. Thank you."
Before she could answer he reached into his jacket and set something on the desk in front of her. A box — small, navy blue, the kind that had a specific weight and a specific meaning. She opened it.
A diamond bracelet. Clean, elegant, the kind of thing chosen by someone who knew exactly what they were doing when they walked into a jeweler.
From somewhere to her left she felt the temperature drop about three degrees. She didn't look — she didn't need to — but she was aware of Blair's eyes on the box with an intensity that could have stripped paint. Blair, who had positioned herself in Liam Caldwell's orbit for what Cheryl suspected was a very long time. Blair, who had never received a navy blue box.
Cheryl closed the lid. "You didn't have to do this."
"I know," Liam said simply. And then the lecturer walked in and he moved to his seat and the moment closed over like water.
***
The Vice Chancellor arrived forty minutes into the next class.
He was a tall man, silver-haired, with the practiced authority of someone who ran large institutions and was used to having rooms go quiet when he entered. He stood at the front and expressed, with genuine weight, his regret over the fire, his concern for those who had been injured, his commitment to a full review of building safety systems.
"The good news," he said, "is that the cost of recovery and all associated losses will be covered in full." He paused. "Thanks to the extraordinary generosity of one of our student's families."
The door opened.
Luis Andrés Montoya Vélez walked in.
Cheryl stared at her father as he was introduced to the room — the Governor of Cundinamarca, the Vice Chancellor said, a man who had demonstrated remarkable commitment to the Princeton community at a moment of real need.
Skye Weston, sitting beside Cheryl, leaned over slowly. "Is that—"
"My dad," Cheryl said.
Skye looked at her. Then at Luis Andrés. Then back at her. "Of course he is," she said, in the tone of someone revising their entire understanding of a situation.
Before the class was released the Vice Chancellor mentioned, almost as an aside, that he would like to see both Ms. Montoya Vélez and Mr. Caldwell in his office after the lecture.
The hour that followed was the longest sixty minutes Cheryl had sat through since arriving at Princeton.
***
The Vice Chancellor's office was the kind of room that had been designed to make people feel the appropriate weight of an institution — dark wood, high ceilings, the portraits of people who had run things before him lining the walls. Luis Andrés was already there when they arrived, seated with the ease of a man who was comfortable in rooms like this one.
The Vice Chancellor shook both their hands and then sat and looked at them with something that was half official and half genuinely warm.
"I want to express, on behalf of this institution and personally, my profound gratitude to Ms. Montoya Vélez," he said. "For her presence of mind, her courage, and for the fact that my son is sitting in this office today because of her."
Liam, beside her, said nothing. But she felt him shift slightly.
"I will also say," the Vice Chancellor continued, the corner of his mouth lifting, "that Liam perhaps should have been the one doing the rescuing, given that he is considerably larger and theoretically more capable of throwing a chair through a window." He looked at his son. "We'll be discussing that at length."
The room laughed — Luis Andrés with genuine delight, Cheryl despite herself, Liam with the expression of someone accepting a consequence he could not reasonably argue against.
"We would very much like for the two of you to get to know each other properly," the Vice Chancellor said, leaning forward. "And to that end — Eliora, my wife, Liam's mother, has asked me to extend a personal invitation. She would like you both to join us for dinner at the estate this evening. She wants to express her appreciation herself." He looked at Cheryl. "She can be quite insistent when she puts her mind to it."
Cheryl glanced sideways at Liam.
Liam was looking straight ahead, jaw set, giving absolutely nothing away.
She looked back at the Vice Chancellor — at the genuine warmth in his face, at her father beside him already nodding — and thought about an estate dinner, and Eliora Caldwell's appreciation, and Liam in a formal setting with nowhere to redirect the conversation.
"We'd be happy to," Luis Andrés said, before Cheryl could form a single word.
She turned to look at her father.
He smiled at her with the serene confidence of a man who had just won something and knew it.
---
If you're loving Love On Borrowed Time throw some power stones! 🗿 Cheryl is about to walk into the Caldwell estate — and something tells me dinner with Eliora won't be simple. See you in Chapter Six. 💛