“Gabriela.”

I want to describe the walk across that lounge, because it was the most honest thing I had done in three years and I did not even understand it while it was happening.

I told Isabela I was getting water.

But my body had already made a decision my mind had not caught up to — had stood, had turned, had begun crossing thirty feet of polished marble toward a woman I had trained myself to never think about.

Every step took me further from the life that had been arranged for me and closer to the one I had thrown away, and I could feel the wrongness of it and the rightness of it at war in my chest with every footfall.

This was not supposed to happen.