all.

It didn’t matter.

Nobody heard me.

They were too busy celebrating the people who had just destroyed me.

So I picked up my bag and walked out before grief turned into a scene they could accuse me of ruining.

Outside, the night air hit me so hard it felt violent.

I leaned against the wall beside my parents’ house and tried to inhale, but my chest locked halfway through every breath.

Through the dining room window, I could still hear laughter.

That was when I saw Diego.

He was standing under the streetlight across the sidewalk, one hand in his coat pocket, the other holding his car keys.

He had probably just gotten back from work.

He looked over when the front door slammed behind me.

Diego had been our neighbor since we were children.

He was also Valentina’s boss.

He was also the man she had been obsessed with for years.

She had started talking about him when we were teenagers, back when he was older, quiet, and already impossibly self-possessed in the way boys our age never were.

She used to sit on my bed and whisper about him like he was a secret she could eventually earn.

“He’ll never notice me,” she used to say, staring toward his house through my bedroom window.

“But I swear I’ve never loved anyone like that.”

I knew every chapter of that obsession.

What she never knew was that years later, Diego confessed something to me too.

He did it gently, almost awkwardly, when we were both old enough to understand what the confession meant.

He told me he liked me.

Not casually.

Not for a week.

He had liked me for a long time.

I remember how careful he looked when he said it, as if he knew my answer mattered more than his pride.

And I remember what I did with that moment.

I buried it.

I never encouraged it.

Never explored it.

Never even allowed myself to think too long about the possibility.

Because of Valentina.

Because she wanted everything intensely.

Because I had spent most of my life smoothing things over for her.

Because even when she was difficult, possessive, or impossible, my family’s rule was always the same: don’t upset Valentina.

So I made myself small, like I always had.

Until that night.

When I saw Diego under that streetlight, something in me snapped.

Maybe it was humiliation.

Maybe it was fury.

Maybe it was the sudden, unbearable realization that I had spent years protecting people who would not protect me for even five seconds.

I walked straight toward him and kissed him.

There was nothing romantic about it at first.

It was raw, desperate, reckless.

A kiss born out of heartbreak and humiliation and a need to prove I had not disappeared.

The second I pulled away, I burst into tears.

Diego did not step back.

He did not ask whether I was drunk or confused.

He didn’t treat me like a mess to be managed.

He cupped my face and asked, very quietly, “What happened?”

So I told him.

Right there on the sidewalk, with mascara running and my whole body shaking, I told him everything.

The announcement.

The applause.

My mother crying for them.

My father congratulating Martín.

The way no one