Chapter Text
The first time she becomes aware of her existence, she’s breathing heavy and screaming. It’s funny how life has a way of repeating itself, Ana thinks, as she’s been alternating between the two again.
This was never supposed to happen. Rather, she’s sure she’s the one who set this rather confusing and somehow staggeringly delightful chain of events into motion in the first place. Because what woman asks another to come live in her house when she can’t let go of a baby she fell in love with and when she’s having to learn to love her own?
That is what was supposed to happen. Ana was meant to fall in love with Valentina while continuing to love Regina. Nowhere in the linear pattern of life was she to develop a sense of comfort with Mariana, to come to think of her as an extension of herself and the life she was living. The Ana before would not have done this. The Ana now cannot fathom anything else.
But before any of this, before anything that’s happening right this second, both she and Mariana had some things to trudge through. Because before the greatest joy in her life, there has also been the greatest heartbreak.
——//——
The beginning should really be a blur, but Ana remembers everything with stark clarity. From the moment her water broke to the second she’s sitting in the car, begging a woman she cannot stand to show up with a child that isn’t hers so she can just smell the scent of her sweet little head again.
The ache of not having Regina in her life is unbearable. Like having the most beautiful thing growing inside you, to have it flower, and then have someone else come and rip it down and away with their hands. No part of it left behind. Simply gone like it was never there at all.
And even though Valentina (Dear Lord, that name she’s given her) was very much someone Ana knew for nine months, forty weeks and sharing a space, the little girl isn’t a soul she knows now. To think they were together longer than they’ve been apart and yet, they’ve lost one another completely in the weeks that have built up.
She doesn’t know how to stifle Valentina’s cry, barely understands how to make her look at her with anything other than consternation or pleading eyes that somehow seem to say, Please give me back to my true Mama.
So the car happens and she’s asking Mariana to come to live in her too-big house and join her too-perfect life because somehow, getting to have Regina back far outweighs the fact that the frustrating girl will be following not far behind.
Ana can do this. She absolutely can.
...it’s just the everything after that presents itself.
The series of ‘never-would’s’ become ‘never-should-have’s’ and ‘never-beginnings’ turn into ‘never-endings’ in Ana’s mind. In her heart.
Mariana, like Ana’s own daughter, goes from being someone who is frustrating at best and downright resolve shattering at worst, to changing into something Ana will never fully understand.
Not because she lacks empathy and love in her heart but simply because she never knew her chest could expand the way that it does as time goes on. Isn’t there only supposed to be enough for Juan Carlos? (The other two children, obviously)
Mariana begins the spiral, the start of Ana’s out of control life. Ana is so caught up in the spinning that she cannot grab hold of the life she’s got left on the sides. Somewhere along the way, she finds out she doesn’t want to.
Ana had a rage-inducing woman next to her when she was trying to breathe through contractions. Ana has had her child switched at birth. Ana can’t make her own child love her so she asks the woman her child does love to move in. Ana finds out that Mariana has a maybe girlfriend. Ana has an affair. Ana may have cancer. Ana eats mushrooms and kisses Mariana to avoid the life waiting for her (or what might be left of it).
So yes, it’s her fault. She should have known that pressing her lips to the younger woman would set off other things she couldn’t control. Like her own heart lurching in her chest because in those seconds she’s holding on for dear life, nothing else exists except Mariana.
There is no Daniel and no Juan Carlos and when Ana’s mouth latches on and stays, she can just think through the haze of her high that this might be who she is too. Someone who begins to get pesky feelings for women she used to not like so much. To imagine a life without her, to imagine life gone completely, and not having Mariana’s big brown eyes telling her it’s all going to be alright.
The kiss does Ana no favors. It does Mariana a lot.
What Ana has come to learn is that what she can blame on dying, on drugs, on a coinciding bump on the head, Mariana takes as being a sliver of hope, of maybe not bouncing from place to place with nowhere safe to land.
Ana represents something Mariana never trusted to exist and something she didn’t intend to find. Something she can’t help but tumble into a messy amalgam of feelings that she comes to think of as love.
Not te quiero mucho. Not even te amo like Ana had (foolishly?) said.
Estoy enamorada de ti.
Well, then. No mistaking that. But Ana hadn’t known how to respond inside of her own hurt, it being too heavy to process what Marianna was saying. Her own response is such a knee-jerk reaction that she’s pretty sure she will never forget the look in Mariana’s eyes.
Un mes para siempre. A month ago, one that has stretched on to eternity.
Ana has lost count of how many times she’s stared down at her phone, how many times her finger has hovered over Mariana’s number. But she hasn’t. That doesn’t mean she’s let go though. Not for even a second.
She’s taken the car out, mostly late, when she’ll only get an eyebrow raise from one of the help instead of the whole house. Pablo’s had been first but that had turned up a dead end. Another woman slipped in and out. Not the one Ana wanted to see.
Despite what Juan Carlos has done, despite his mistress and Regina’s abuelita, Ana finds herself sitting outside of where she’s heard Teresa and Mariana might be staying. She isn’t sure though.
The curtains are closed and a soft light glows within. Ana is stationary an exorbitant amount of time sitting in wait—for what, she does not know.
After a while, a figure walks in front, a silhouette of darkness in the light. Ana can’t help the way Valentina’s snores in her car seat narrow to imperceptibility or the way her own hands grip her steering wheel. Her heart dances in her own chest, dreaming.
Mi corazón.
That thought wafts through too. Almost startles Ana with the clarity at which it presents itself. Because, she supposes, she’s a little bit in love too.
The reason becomes starker the longer she sits. No one does what she has, no one writes their life the way Ana has these last few months if it’s not a love story in the making.
For so many reasons, Ana comes to a decision that night in the car, staring at what may or may not be the form of Mariana in the window: she’s going to get her back. Get them both. Mariana and Regina.
The light flicks off, the darkness takes over.
“Buenas noches,” Ana finds herself whispering. Because even if that isn’t Mariana, she wants her to have a good night—wherever she is.
——//——
Ana isn’t sure what to say to Mariana the first time they see one another again.
Sorry for breaking your heart is a little too on the nose because her own doesn’t feel like it’s worked quite right in four weeks. Ana taps a nail against the kitchen counter and stares off into space.
With Juan Carlos, he had pursued her. She’d had to do little to win him twenty years ago because the part of her that is a tad bit vain knew she was a good catch for him and he could be for her if she’d work her mind around it. They’d proven they could withstand two decades.
But year twenty-one proved to be too much for a lot of reasons, and now Ana is contemplating how to woo someone who she didn’t care for initially, whom she treated with rancor. That thought makes her sigh. Well, and the fact that Mariana is barely into her twenties (and Ana pushing forty) and that she’s never had to woo someone in her entire life.
Mariana has a birthday coming up, Ana knows. It’s notated in her phone’s calendar. She supposes she can start there.
Ana is not daft in her thinking, knows that a phone call would probably go a lot farther than things, but it’s the language Ana knows to speak and so she spends hours perusing arrangement after vase of flowers.
By now, she knows where Mariana is. Where she’s staying and that she picked classes back up at the school. To be a mathematician.
Ana raises her eyebrows and shakes her head. How wrongly she had pegged Mariana. Those doe eyes and that innocence had parted to reveal a woman whom Ana found herself irrevocably drawn to.
Perhaps she’s a masochist, perhaps a hopeless sad sack who has lost her way, but she makes sure to be available when Mariana finishes her class, to be watching when the beautifully wrapped red carnations (Ana didn’t choose them because of price. She could have bought a thousand other options. The meaning behind them is what matters) get put into Mariana’s hand.
Ana also could have written a thousand different things on the card included—soy una idiota, perdóname, por favor —but she had gone for none of those things. Vienes a casa. Come home. That’s what she’s gone with.
Mariana’s face screws up in confusion, then her eyes register what has happened, and she starts to scan the area. Ana ducks in her seat because she’s decidedly less ready to confront Mariana this way than at her door.
Thankfully, (or not) Mariana doesn’t catch her overly priced car sitting in the parking lot, but Ana absolutely does catch her purchase going in a trash receptacle. If it were possible to sink lower in her European leather seats, she would.
Ana should have expected this though. It’s what she deserves after Mariana had uncovered a part of herself to which Ana’s only response was to tell her to leave the life they’d all built together.
Improbably, she sinks lower and bites at her thumb. This is what happens when words leave scars. She’ll just have to do better next time.
By the time she formulates her new plan and rises to start the car, Mariana is long gone. The next idea in her act of love is not.
It follows Ana to bed and it keeps her tossing and turning. It has her skirting her hands lower but, no, she cannot. Aún no. She must wait for what may yet come.
If Ana wants this to be a love story, she must do what is needed to make it such. Mariana will come home with Regina, Ana will get to tell her what feelings have been bubbling up since even before Ana had thought she might be dying.
Which is another thing that propels Ana to keep her hand away—she’s got time. While still not exactly sure how long she’s got left, she knows she doesn’t have to draw up papers to plan for her eventual death (now later rather than sooner) because she’s not dying and she can afford to spend the hours and days showing Mariana she is capable of loving her and their daughters until her own blissful end.
Rodrigo and Cecí might not understand it, but Ana is almost sure of their ability to adapt. Cecí is more concerned with her own teenage life than to worry about whom her mother takes into her heart (or her bed because oh , how she wants that too) As for Rodrigo, Ana is fairly certain that he’s just as in love with Mariana as she is.
Ana spends the next day after work picking out what comes next. She doesn’t hold out any stops, picks out the delicate ‘V’ and ‘R’ letters with twin bauble birthstones dangling from the golden chain.
For someone special? the woman at the counter asks as she places it in a box and begins to wrap it up.
The one becoming my whole world, Ana finds herself confessing like she’s in the church and sitting on the other side of a priest. It startles her a little how easily it comes out, how easily she smiles. So much that her cheeks hurt as she thinks about the way this will look on Mariana’s wrist.
Ana leaves the jewelry store, heedless of the woman’s eyes and smile fixed on her, gripping the bag with all her might. She doesn’t even care that she’s used the card she shares with Juan Carlos either because she makes money too, so what does it matter if suddenly a couple of thousand dollars are now out of their joint account?
Maybe when he’d left a month ago, she had entertained the idea of asking him to stay. But Mariana had also kissed her the day before and even though she had been hurt by Mariana, (and also falling for her) she was incensed by Juan Carlos.
She’s either incredibly bold or incredibly stupid when she knocks on the door of Mariana’s (temporary, just temporary) apartment because Ana knows Teresa is there. And while she can’t exactly stand her face, she also knows she loves the woman’s daughter more than she hates the woman, so that wins out.
Teresa, to put it mildly, is not exactly happy to see her. In fact, she mirrors as such, snipping out that Mariana isn’t home, that she has a late class on Thursdays. Which Ana already knows. That’s why she is here.
“If you’d just give this to her,” Ana tells her, lacking her elegantly flowing Spanish speech that she tends to have most of the time. She’s nervous.
She motions to Teresa’s hand, who looks dubious. Finally, Teresa relents, looking rather put out and holds out a palm. Ana places the long box in it, ducks her head to avoid Teresa’s wide eyes and corresponding gasp.
“Ana…”
And Teresa doesn’t get to call her that, doesn’t get to act like they know one another even if they share a granddaughter in a less than conventional way. Ana shakes her head, cuts Teresa off.
“It’s nothing,” she waves absently, well aware that what she’s saying isn’t exactly true.
As if to prove that infuriating traits run in the family, Teresa pops the lid with a squeak, and Ana can’t help but let out a snort of derision as she looks out at the setting sun and places her hands on her hips.
“Ay dios mío,” Teresa mutters.
Ana gesticulates with her hands, eventually snaps the box closed almost on Teresa’s fingers. “Give it to her?”
Teresa swallows and nods and Ana knows she will have to let that be enough. She lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding and relaxes her shoulders a bit. “Okay then.”
She spins on a heel and walks back to her car. She doesn’t turn around to meet the look Teresa is burning in the back of her.
Minutes turn to hours. Ana cannot tear herself away from her phone that never rings. Maybe that night, she holds Valentina a little bit closer, hugs her a little bit harder. She wishes her daughter could infuse her with all of the essence that Mariana has put into her. But after a month, whatever Mariana may have left behind is long gone.
Ana doesn’t have to be a psychic to know that Valentina misses her too. She’s sure they both fall asleep that way in the rocking chair, missing the ones who aren’t there. The ones who make both their hearts fill with joy.