CHAPTER 1

The Delivery

I was holding the silver picture frame, the one with my father and me in it, both of us in suits, when the phone rang. It was my mother.

“Hi, Mom. How are you?”

“I’m fine, sweetheart. The question is how are you.”

“I’m fine,” I lied. “Though I have to admit, these past two nights haven’t been easy.”

And then my voice broke. I cried, really cried this time, with no cameras, no protocol.

“I miss him so much, Mom. He was a remarkable man, and you knew that better than anyone.”

“I know, my love. I know.”

“I love you, José Daniel,” she said, before hanging up.

Nobody else called me that. To everyone, ever since I’d come back from Paris, I was simply Daniel.

But my mother still called me by both names together, as if she needed to name in full the person I had been before I decided, without anyone explicitly asking me to, to hide half of myself in a drawer.

I hung up. I stayed a moment staring at the picture frame, not knowing what to do with it or with myself.

The intercom buzzed. The sound, so ordinary, so foreign to everything I was feeling, startled me in an almost ridiculous way.

“Yes, Lucho?” I answered, my voice still rough from crying.

“Doctor, the delivery from the pharmacy you ordered is here.”

“Yes, Lucho, send him up. Thank you very much.”

I hung up. I laid the picture frame face down on the sofa and went to the door.

I searched my pockets. I didn’t have enough cash.

I went to the bedroom for more, and in that brief trip, fifteen, twenty seconds, no more, I lived, without knowing it yet, the last seconds of my life as I had known it until then.

The door sounded.

“Come in, it’s open,” I shouted from the hallway.

I came out into the living room counting the bills I had just taken from the bedroom, not yet looking up. It was only when I reached the open door that I raised my eyes.

And there he was.

I don’t know exactly how long we stood there looking at each other without saying anything.

Probably two, maybe three seconds, but the body has a particular way of stretching time when something important is about to happen to it, even if you have no way of knowing yet.

He was wearing the app’s jacket, with the logo embroidered on the chest, an insulated bag slung on his back, and his hair a little tousled from the helmet he held under his arm.

He was not, in any objective sense, someone dressed to impress anybody.

And yet I felt, in a way I couldn’t name at that moment, something in my chest shift out of place.

“Uh… hi,” I said, and even as the words left my mouth, I knew I sounded like an idiot. “I mean, good evening. Good evening. Are you the delivery? I mean, the delivery guy. From the app. You.”

I realized, with an almost physical clarity, how bad that last sentence had sounded. “You,” just like that, as if I were pointing at an object and not a person.

He held back a laugh. He didn’t quite laugh, but I saw a smile appear at the corner of his mouth before he managed to contain it.

“Yes, sir. The delivery guy. From the app. That’s me.”

He paused briefly, as if giving me time to pull myself together, something I silently thanked him for.

“Good evening. Here you go.”

He handed me the pharmacy bag. It was in that exchange, awkward like everything else in those first minutes, that the bills slipped from my hand, and we both bent down at the same time to pick them up, our heads almost colliding.

“Sorry,” I murmured, more to myself than to him.

I stood up first. And it was then, as I held the money out to him again, that I felt something warm run down my upper lip. I didn’t know what it was until he noticed before I did.

“Is something wrong?” he asked, with real urgency in his voice. “Your nose is bleeding.”

I raised a hand to my face. The red stain on my fingers took me completely by surprise; I hadn’t felt anything, no blow, no warning, just that sudden warmth that now became obvious as I looked at my hand.

I lifted my head and saw genuine alarm on his face, the alarm of someone who had no obligation whatsoever to worry about a stranger and yet was doing so with complete sincerity.

“Here, let me help you, sit down,” he said, taking my arm with a firmness I hadn’t expected from someone who, thirty seconds earlier, was nothing more than a name on an app screen.

He sat me down on the sofa, right where minutes before I had left my father’s picture frame face down, with no way of knowing the symbolic weight of that gesture or of that piece of furniture.

“That’s strange, I don’t know what happened,” I said, my head tilted back, feeling ridiculous. “Please, go to the bathroom and bring me some tissue, at the end on the right.”

“Yes, yes, of course. Be right back.”

He left almost at a run. And in those seconds alone, my head back and my eyes fixed on the ceiling, I thought that I had known this person for less than two minutes, no exaggeration, and I already felt more accompanied than in the last two entire nights.

He came back with the tissue. He went to clean me up himself, without asking, with a gentleness that contrasted almost violently with the roughness I could see in his hands: the hands of someone who truly works with them, not of someone who pampers them at a spa every two weeks, like mine.

“Let me do it,” he said, in a tone that allowed no argument.

I let him. I watched him as he worked, enchanted in a way that was probably obvious to anyone who might have seen us from outside, though he, busy with his task, didn’t seem to notice.

“Looks like the bleeding stopped,” he said at last, stepping back a little to assess his work. “Feeling better?”

“Yes, it’s fine. Thank you so much. It happens to me sometimes,” I lied; it never happened to me, or at least not that I could remember, but admitting that the stress of the funeral had probably burst some blood vessel seemed, at that moment, like too much information to share with a stranger.

I took out of the pharmacy bag the box of sleeping pills my mother had insisted on ordering. Before I could get up for a glass of water, he had already gotten ahead of me.

“Stay still, I’ll get you some water.”

“Thank you. I really appreciate it.”

He went off to the kitchen again, and I stayed there, sitting on my own sofa, in my own apartment, paid for with money that deep down had never quite felt like mine, completely hypnotized by how kind and gentle a total stranger was being with me.

I took off my tie completely this time (it no longer hung loose around my neck but lay folded over the arm of the sofa) and undid the top button of my shirt, as if my body had decided, without consulting me, that there was no longer any need to keep up so much composure.

He came back with the glass of water and picked up the box of pills.

“How many do you take?”

“Give me two.”

He handed them to me along with the glass. I took them under his gaze, which watched me with an attention that felt almost medical, almost maternal, very different from the look we had exchanged at the door just minutes before.

“Better now?”

“Yes, thank you so much, you’re very kind… and, by the way, what’s your name?”

He was thoughtful for a second, as if the question had caught him off guard.

“Yes, sorry. My name is Sebastián.”

Sebastián. The name stuck with me in a way that made no logical sense for someone I had just met.

“Sebastián? Nice name,” I said, looking at him in a way that probably no longer tried to hide anything. “Pleased to meet you, I’m Daniel. Sebastián, thank you so much for taking the time to look after me. I truly don’t know how to repay you.”

“It’s my pleasure.”

And so, without either of us planning it, without either of us knowing yet what that night was about to dig up between us, it all began.

“Can I offer you something to drink?” I asked. “And don’t tell me no, because it would make me feel bad, after everything you’ve done for me.”

“It’s the least anyone would do,” he replied with a shrug. “It’s about being supportive of others, right?”

“Believe me, it isn’t always like that, Sebastián.”

I said it more seriously than I’d intended. He seemed to notice, but didn’t press.

“But anyway,” he went on, “all right, since I haven’t gotten any other orders, I’ll stay a little longer with you.”

“Call me Daniel. Drop the ‘sir.’”

“Okay, all right… Daniel,” he said, and laughed, as if trying the name out in his mouth for the first time.

“Would you like a whiskey?”

“Oh, no. I ride a bike, and whiskey hits me hard. I’ll take a soda instead.”

I gave him a look that must have been quite eloquent, because he corrected himself at once.

“Okay, a beer is fine.”

“Lager, dark, light? I have a really good Belgian one,” I said, already heading for the kitchen.

“A what?” he asked, genuinely puzzled.

“Yes, a Belgian beer. What did you think I said?”

“Forget it,” he said, holding back a laugh. “A beer. As long as it’s cold, that’s enough.”

I felt my face grow a little warm. I had spent half my life learning to talk about wines and vintages so as not to embarrass myself at dinner parties, and there I was, applying the same instinct to an ordinary beer in front of a delivery guy who probably thought he was talking to a lunatic.

“Right. Sorry. Sometimes I talk too much when I’m nervous.”

The word slipped out before I could think. I went into the kitchen without giving him time to comment.

I came back with two regular beers, with no additional adjectives.

He had already stood up and was looking around the living room, lingering a second too long on the picture frame I had left face down on the sofa.

He picked it up, curious, just as I was coming back in, and put it back with an almost guilty speed, as if I’d caught him going through something that wasn’t his to touch.

“Nice place,” he said, instead of asking what he probably wanted to ask.

“Here you go,” I handed him the beer. “You think so?”

“Thanks. Yes, very nice and cozy.”

“I’m glad you say so. Sometimes we’re so busy that we forget to value and enjoy the things we have, right there around us.”

“Why do you say that?” he asked, sitting down again. “I noticed a certain melancholy in your voice when you said it.”

I picked up the picture frame and moved it, face up this time, with its back to where he was sitting, a gesture so small I doubt he noticed.

“Things happen, Sebastián. Life is a moment, and in the blink of an eye we’re gone.”

I sat down beside him.

“You speak with a lot of feeling, Daniel, as if you…”

“Shhh,” I interrupted, perhaps more gently than I had spoken to anyone in months. “How lovely it is to hear someone say your name, and not always ‘sir,’ ‘boss,’ ‘doctor,’ ‘chief,’ and all those labels they hang on you, as if we weren’t all equal.”

“I don’t want to pry into your life,” he said, after a silence, “but something is going on with you, isn’t it? Don’t worry, I don’t want you to feel pressured. Unless you want to tell me what’s happening.”

And then, without having planned it, without any trained part of me authorizing it, the words came out on their own.

“You know what? I like you a lot, Sebastián. I feel alone. I have everything, and I have nothing.”

I cried. Again, the second time in the same night in front of a stranger, something that hadn’t happened to me once in the previous three years in front of anyone I truly knew.

I took a drink. He said nothing. He simply took my head and rested it against his shoulder, without asking permission, without needing me to ask it of him.

“My father died yesterday,” I said, against the fabric of his jacket, “and I just got back from his funeral.”