Your mother went quiet.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means I won’t beg to be invited anymore.”
“Oh, don’t be dramatic.”
“No,” you said. “For once, I’m being clear.”
You heard your mother inhale.
“You are punishing us because your sister needed one peaceful Christmas?”
“You had a peaceful Christmas,” you said. “You got exactly what you wanted.”
“That’s unfair.”
“No, Mom. What’s unfair is teaching one daughter that her feelings matter and the other that she should disappear.”
Your mother’s voice hardened.
“You’re jealous of Valeria.”
You almost laughed.
Maybe you were.
Not of her pregnancy.
Not of her marriage.
Not of her life.
You were jealous that she could break a glass and everyone rushed to protect her from the sound, while you could bleed quietly in a corner and be told you were making a mess.
“Maybe I was,” you said. “But I’m tired now.”
“Tired of what?”
“Trying to earn a mother I never really had.”
The silence that followed was enormous.
Then she said, very coldly, “If that’s how you feel, maybe distance is best.”
You looked around your little apartment.
At the suitcase still packed.
At the gifts no one would receive.
At the ornament glitter still stuck to your sleeve from Elena’s tree.
“Yes,” you whispered. “Maybe it is.”
You hung up first.
Your hands shook afterward.
But beneath the shaking, there was something new.
Space.
In the weeks that followed, nobody from your family reached out except your father.
He sent one text.
Your mother is upset. You should apologize.
You stared at it for a long time.
Then you replied:
I’m upset too. No one asked me to dinner. No one asked if I was okay. No one has apologized to me.
He did not respond.
That was its own answer.
Elena, however, did not disappear.
She texted the day after Christmas.
Then New Year’s.
Then a random Tuesday to ask whether you liked chicken soup.
By February, you were having Sunday dinner at the Mendoza house twice a month.
By spring, Elena knew your coffee order, your work schedule, and the fact that you pretended not to care about your birthday but secretly did.
Daniel was often there.
At first, you kept your guard up around him.
He was kind, funny, and patient, which made him dangerous in a different way. You knew how to survive rejection. You did not know what to do with consistency.
He never pushed.
He talked to you while washing dishes.
He asked about your dreams without making them sound silly.
When you mentioned that you had once wanted to become a teacher but dropped out because your parents said Valeria’s baby expenses were more urgent than helping with your last semester, Daniel did not say, “You should go back,” as if it were easy.
He said, “That dream still sounds alive when you talk about it.”
That night, you went home and opened the website for Northeastern Illinois University.
