I went on. “He was leaving for university. He wanted to ask me out before he left. He told me later that he never understood why I ignored him. I thought he had changed his mind. I thought I had imagined everything between us. So we both walked away, each believing the other had chosen silence.”
Diego’s eyes stayed on me. We had talked through that old wound on a rainy evening months earlier, after too much coffee and not enough sleep. He had described the envelope, the blue ink, the way he had waited for an answer that never came. I had told him how strange his distance had felt after that summer, how often I had blamed myself for not being braver.
We had both been manipulated by a gap neither of us created.
“I found that letter three weeks ago,” I said.
Now even Valentina’s breathing changed. My mother stared at me.
“What letter?” she whispered.
“In the attic,” I said. “You asked me to help sort the old storage boxes from the house. There was a tin box taped shut under a stack of Valentina’s school notebooks. Inside it was an opened envelope with my name on it, in Diego’s handwriting. And inside that same box were pages torn from Valentina’s teenage journal.”