Page 50 of Every Step She Takes
Mal
It makes the front page.
There’s a side-by-side photo and everything.
The first: a staged press image of handsome Valentim Costa, in a Valentino suit, cutting the ribbon at the newest vineyard in Rioja a few years ago.
The second: a grainy, nighttime cell phone shot of his daughter in profile on the veranda at the Vigo vineyard, holding a wineglass while her body is draped all over a nameless redhead.
Only Sadie and I know that I was crying when this photo was taken, and that she was trying to comfort me; only we know that I was only holding that glass of wine because I absentmindedly took it with me when I fled the dinner table.
But to the rest of the world, this photo makes me look like the drunk, hedonistic nepo baby of my father’s nightmares.
The splashy headline says it all: THE FUTURE OF THE COSTA FAMILY EMPIRE? With a fucking question mark.
The photos answer the question for anyone who might be unclear on exactly what that future is. The Costa family empire is now in the hands of a debauched lesbian who can’t be trusted with your investments.
There was already a 6 a.m. phone call from the vice president of the board about whether I’m “fit for duty.” (I’m not.) There was an email from stepmom-slash-interim CEO about strategic damage control that cc’d the entire publicity team; a dozen concerned text messages from Luzia; and a million WhatsApp missives from every person I’ve ever met from the Iberian Peninsula.
But I can’t respond to any of them. I’m in the lobby of our Redondela hostel, clutching the first copy of El País I could find, immobilized as the world crumbles all around me. My eyes flicker over the Spanish article, my brain latching onto the most horrible highlights.
“… Spain is still mourning the loss of a great man…”
“… left his legacy to his absentee daughter…”
“… wasted her twenties and thirties partying around the world…”
“… the prodigal daughter returned, only to be seen cavorting with a buxom redhead…”
“… sources say unpredictable Maelys hasn’t even visited the corporate offices in Lisbon since her father’s passing…”
“… Quinta Costa employs more than ten thousand people in Spain alone, and their livelihoods now depend on an aging party girl…”
They get uglier, and I punish myself by reading them over and over again. Because this is all my fault. I refused to face my inheritance directly, so now I’m facing the front page of a national newspaper.
My chest tightens, and there’s a football in my throat, and all I can do is stare at that low-quality photo of Sadie and me.
That’s the worst part: the way this photo distorts an innocent moment, the way the article treats Sadie as a faceless object of temptation, the way I brought her into all of this, exposed her to public scrutiny, made her an accessory to my catastrophic mess.
I don’t know who took this photo. No one on the tour would do something so cruel, something that could out Sadie before she’s ready. But there were a dozen people from my father’s staff wandering around the vineyard at any given moment. My staff. People who sold me out for a trite news story.
I hate that this photo ruins the perfect memories of those nights with Sadie at the vineyard, that it taints something I hold so sacred.
That I tainted it, ruined it, like I knew I would, and now I can barely breathe.
“Mal?”
My name sounds faint over the screaming thoughts inside my head. I turn, half-numb, and see Vera standing in the lobby in her matching silk pajama set. “I saw the news on my phone,” she says to me in a quiet voice. “I’m so sorry they printed that garbage. That private picture of you and—”
“Don’t tell Sadie.” The entire newspaper crumples in my tightened fists. Vera watches me smash the photo and the article and the whole damn thing into a wad before tossing it in the nearest trash can.
“Of course,” she says gently. “You should be the one to tell Sadie.”
“No. I-I don’t want her to know about it at all.”
Vera stares at me through her giant, tortoise-shell glasses. “You… you’re not going to tell her?”
“Please,” is all I say in response. I feel like a crumpled newspaper in someone else’s fist.
“ Please .”
Vera doesn’t say anything at all.
I’m avoiding Sadie again.
I avoid her at breakfast when she tries to ask me why I wasn’t in bed this morning.
I avoid her as we leave the hostel in the pouring rain, as we trudge through the wet countryside, as we push through the storm until we reach the N550.
When we stop for morning tea, I finally tell her I have a headache.
It’s not a lie, exactly. It does feel like someone is drilling into my skull with a dull screw.
The lie is that I don’t tell her everything else.
I can’t even look at her freckled face without drowning in guilt.
It’s not a particularly challenging day—only 19.
5 kilometers to Pontevedra, with little elevation change after the initial hills— but I’m out of breath the entire time.
I can’t seem to fill my lungs all the way, and there’s a stabbing pain every time I try.
The more I gasp and choke for air, the more my headache intensifies, the more I worry I’ll never be able to breathe again.
We arrive in Pontevedra a little after two, each of us soaked beyond reason. After checking into our private albergue, Inez sends us to our rooms to dry off and siesta before dinner. I can’t get there fast enough.
I need to take off my too-heavy pack and my too-tight sneakers that I stole from my childhood bedroom in Vigo. I need to rip off these thick, wet wool socks and these waterlogged layers. I can’t have any fabric touching my skin. Only then will I finally be able to catch my breath.
“Mal.” Sadie’s soft voice, usually such a comfort, grinds against the back of my teeth.
I don’t want her to see me like this. I don’t want anyone to see me like this.
I’m like one of those women who excuses herself from the dinner table when she starts to choke because she’s too embarrassed to let anyone see her cough, one of those women who ends up dying alone in the kitchen.
“Mal, what’s wrong?”
“Everything hurts and I can’t breathe,” I snarl as I forcefully kick off my shoes. One sneaker bangs against an Ikea wardrobe in the corner of the room and leaves behind a muddy print.
“You can’t breathe?” Sadie repeats, stepping closer to me. A soothing hand finds my shoulder, but I yank myself away.
“I-I can’t have anything touching me right now,” I try to explain. I’m just lucid enough to realize how deranged this sounds.
But Sadie doesn’t react like it’s deranged at all.
“Can I help?” She carefully untangles my arm from my wet raincoat, and my chest feels a little looser.
Then she removes my damp fleece, my T-shirt, my soaked-through socks.
My bare feet on the cold hardwood ground me.
When I’m wearing nothing but my underwear and a tank top, Sadie leads me over to one of the twin beds.
There’s still a pain in my ribs, a sharpness in each shallow inhale.
“Why can’t I breathe?” I ask her.
She perches on the bed next to me. “I think you’re having a panic attack.”
I cough out a strangled laugh. “I-I don’t have panic attacks.”
“Okay.” She’s as close to me as she can be without touching my skin, stripped down to her own underclothes as our outfits sit in a wet mound across from us. “Can you smell that?”
I inhale through my nose. “Smell what?”
“I don’t know… something spicy, maybe? Or smoky?”
“The only thing I can smell is my own body odor,” I tell her after sniffing the air. There’s something especially potent about the mixture of sweat and wet clothes.
Sadie shakes her head. “No, not that. You don’t smell it?”
She takes a long, deep breath through her nose, and I do the same. “I smell your wildflower shampoo,” I tell her.
“Wildflower shampoo?” she touches her rain-soaked hair. “Oh, it’s hibiscus. No, not that.”
“And I can smell whatever cleaning products they used in this room.”
“Not that either,” she says, and she keeps taking long, deep inhales through her nose, like she’s desperate to name the phantom smell, and I keep taking those long, deep breaths with her, until my ribs start to expand with each inhalation, until the pain in my lungs begins to subside, and oh. Duh.
There is no smell.
“Where did you learn that little trick?” I ask when I’m able to take several deep breaths in a row without asphyxiating.
Sadie offers me a small smile. “You pick up a few things growing up with a mom who has severe anxiety.”
“I don’t have anxiety.”
“Okay,” she says again. “How can I help with this non-anxiety, non–panic attack?”
I keep taking deep breaths, keep breathing in that hibiscus scent. “You’ve already helped.”
She lifts her right hand and hesitates a second before she uses it to take mine. Our fingers stitch together. Her touch no longer feels suffocating. It feels like a slow, deep breath.
“Have… has this ever happened to you before?”
“No,” I answer. But then I think about every paralyzing memory of my father’s anger and disappointment.
The way I freeze every time I remember the night I came out to him.
The numbness and lightheadedness, the way it feels like there’s a boulder on my chest sometimes.
The racing thoughts and the fear of the quiet.
The way I can’t settle into anything, can’t sit still, can’t let myself stay in love.
“Sometimes,” I quietly confess, “when I think about my dad, I get this… this tightness.” I rub the heel of my palm over my sternum, over the place where the worst memories live, right behind my compass tattoo. “When I remember the night he rejected me, I get this sort of… I don’t know.”
I can’t find the words to describe this kind of pain.
Sadie holds my hand in silence for a long time. “Do you think you might have some PTSD from all of that?”
“No,” I say too quickly. “Or… maybe? I don’t know.”