Chapter 5 - Ridícula
"Ethan." Val's voice came out low, and shaking, and dangerous in a way that had nothing to do with volume. "Ethan, estoy en entrevista."
I'm in an interview.
"I—wait, what?" The laugh in his throat caught, stuttered, something in his face beginning, finally, to shift.
"On the call. Right now. That was—" She gestured at the laptop with a cream-covered hand, unable to finish the sentence, because finishing it meant saying the words out loud, and saying them out loud meant they were real. "That man is deciding whether to give us sixty thousand dollars, Ethan, and you just—"
"I didn't know it was a real meeting, I thought—"
"You thought what? That I set up a folding table and put on my one good shirt for fun?"
"I thought it was, like, a screening call, some assistant, I didn't think—" He set the plate down on the dresser too hard, and it clattered, cake sliding sideways off the edge onto the floor, one strawberry rolling under the bed where it would sit forgotten for three days. "Val, I'm sorry, I really thought—"
"Dios, Val, te ves ridícula," came another voice, and Val's head snapped toward the laptop.
The words hadn't come from Ethan.
They'd come from the small speaker, faint but audible, someone off-screen laughing lightly, half to themselves, the way people laugh at something on a screen when they don't realize the microphone on the other end might still be catching stray sound before the mute fully engages.
God, Val, you look ridiculous.
Val didn't know if it was Grant's assistant, someone else in the room with him, or Grant himself in a moment of unguarded, cruel amusement. She would never find out. It didn't matter which. The words had already landed exactly where words like that always land — somewhere just beneath the ribs, somewhere that would ache for days.
She turned back to Ethan.
Cream had begun to dry at the corner of her eye, tightening the skin there, and she could feel one whole strawberry seed lodged against her eyelash, and underneath the physical discomfort was something so much larger it had no shape yet, only weight.
"Do you understand what you just did?" she asked. Not loud. Not shouting. Something colder than shouting.
"I'll call him back. I'll explain, I'll say it was a mix-up, a joke gone wrong, people will understand—"
"People don't invest sixty thousand dollars in a business run by someone they just watched get assaulted with cake on a professional call, Ethan." The word assaulted came out before she'd chosen it, too big, too sharp, but she didn't take it back. "This isn't a joke that gets explained away. This was the only meeting. This was the whole bridge."
"The whole—what bridge, what are you talking about?"
And there it was — the gap between them, wide and sudden, the fact that Val had never once told him the full number, the full stakes, the surgery, the treatment, the specific fragile architecture of hope she'd built entirely alone because some part of her hadn't trusted him to hold it without dropping it.
She almost told him then. The whole forty-nine thousand, four hundred dollars of it. The exact shape of what he'd just knocked off a dresser along with a plate of cake.
She didn't.
Instead she picked up the small hand towel hanging by the closet — white, soft, the good one, the one she used for nothing important — and pressed it hard against her face, wiping cream from her eye, her cheek, the collar of her ruined shirt.
Ethan stood in the doorway, laughter completely gone now, replaced by something uncertain and afraid, watching her scrub at her own face like she was trying to remove more than cake.
"Val," he said, quieter now. "Talk to me. Whatever it is, we'll fix it."
She didn't answer.
May you like
She kept wiping, slow and deliberate, and the silence in the room grew a texture of its own — thick, electric, the specific silence that comes right before someone says something they can never fully take back.
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