The morning Bogotá decided to be sentimental about it, Cheryl Sofia Montoya Vélez was sitting cross-legged on her bedroom floor with her phone pressed to her ear, watching María fold the same cashmere sweater for what had to be the fourth time.
"She's doing the folding thing," Cheryl murmured into the phone.
"The slow, deliberate, I-am-heartbroken-but-will-not-say-it folding?" That was Beryl Castañeda, calling from her apartment two neighborhoods over, voice warm and entirely too perceptive.
"That exact one."
"Let her fold." Peryl Mejia's voice came through next, slightly breathless with music sounds from the back, like she was driving or probably just out of the club. "You're leaving, Cher. The woman raised you. She gets to fold."
The Ryl Trio. That was what everyone at Universidad de los Andes had called them since their second year; Beryl, Peryl, and Cheryl, three elite girls from wealthy, high class and powerful family, who someway or the other had the same ending of sound to their names. The name had started as a joke shared in the back row. People would ask if they related and stuff. They later became best of friends and then solidified into something none of them questioned anymore, the way the best things always did.
"I don't want to go," Cheryl said. She had said it before. She would say it again.
"We know," said Beryl and Peryl, with the synchronicity of people who had been finishing each other's sentences for three years.
Beryl sighed. "Cher. Your father is the Governor of Cundinamarca. He's not going to leave you in Bogotá alone while he spends months in the United States closing a business deal. You know how he is. You have always known how he is."
Cheryl did know how he was. Luis Andrés Montoya Vélez governed an entire Colombian department with a reputation for precision and authority, and he could not go forty-eight hours without checking that his daughter was alive, warm, and within a reasonable radius of him. He had been this way since Cheryl's mother died — since Valentina Vélez had been taken by a brain aneurysm on a Tuesday afternoon when Cheryl was four years old, sudden and total, no warning and no goodbye. Luis Andrés had responded to that loss by becoming, in the gentlest possible way, completely unable to let Cheryl out of his sight.
It was suffocating sometimes. It was also, Cheryl knew, entirely made of love.
"He enrolled me at Princeton," she said, still vaguely incredulous about it. "Princeton, New Jersey. Because that was the closest university to where he'll be based."
"Princeton," Peryl repeated, in the tone of someone tasting a word they found unreasonably dramatic. "You poor thing. Forced to attend an Ivy League university. Truly, your suffering is unique."
"I'm going to miss Uniandes. I'm going to miss Bogotá. I'm going to miss you both so much I don't know what to do with it."
There was a pause, the kind that held too much to be easily spoken, and then Beryl said, quietly: "We'll call every day. Same as always. Nothing about us changes."
"Promise?"
"We promise," said Peryl. "Now go. And Cher, go be extraordinary. You were going to do it here. Go do it there instead."
Cheryl pressed the phone to her cheek for a moment after they hung up, as though she could hold the call a little longer by sheer will. Then María appeared in the doorway with the look of a woman who had packing to supervise and no time for sentiment, and Cheryl got up off the floor.
***
The penthouse was, by any measure, absurd.
It sat on the top floor of a building twelve minutes from Princeton's campus — her father had timed the route personally, then had someone else time it to verify — and it had floor-to-ceiling windows, a kitchen that gleamed with stainless steel Cheryl had no intention of using, a dining table that seated eight people she did not yet know, and a walk-in wardrobe that was, when she arrived, already full.
Not just full. Organized. By color, then by occasion, then by season. The winter section alone was enough to outfit a small expedition.
"Papá called ahead," María said, when Cheryl stood in the wardrobe doorway and simply stared.
"He sent my measurements."
"He sent your measurements, your recent purchase history, and a note about the New Jersey winters." María adjusted a coat on its hanger. "He worries."
"He always worries."
"He lost your mother." María said it gently, the way she always did, not as an excuse for Luis Andrés but as a context, a thing to be held alongside the overprotectiveness and the advance-organized wardrobes and the gifts that appeared after every school play he missed, every birthday dinner he had to cut short, every recital where his seat in the front row stayed empty until the last possible moment. There had been a lot of gifts over the years. Cheryl owned more cashmere than most adults twice her age, and every piece of it meant I'm sorry, and I love you, and I'm trying.
"I know," Cheryl said. She pulled a coat from the rack, turned it over in her hands, and put it back. "I know he does."
María was the constant that Luis Andrés's schedule could never be. María Eugenia Restrepo had been with the Montoya Vélez household since before Cheryl was born, and she was — in all the ways that required daily, steady presence, the closest thing to a mother Cheryl had. She was sixty-one, five feet tall, completely unimpressed by wealth or politics, and she had never once let Cheryl go to bed without dinner or wake up to an empty apartment. In this new city, that mattered more than the penthouse.
"It's going to be fine," Cheryl told her reflection in the wardrobe mirror. Her reflection looked politely skeptical. "It's going to be fine," she said again, more firmly, and went to unpack.
***
The night before her first day at Princeton, it rained.
Not a pleasant, cinematic rain — the kind that cleared by morning and left everything smelling of petrichor and new beginnings. The kind that settled in, heavy and determined, and left behind puddles the size of small ponds and gutters that ran like rivers. Cheryl watched it from her penthouse window while María made aguapanela and told her to sleep early.
She did not sleep early.
She was, consequently, running late.
"Cheryl Sofia." María was in the bedroom doorway. It was never a good sign when she used both names.
"I'm ready, I'm ready". She grabbed her bag and turned to face the wardrobe problem she'd been avoiding: getting dressed. The wardrobe her father had stocked offered approximately forty-seven options for a first day of university, and she had stood in front of it for twenty minutes already. She finally reached for a cream blazer — sharp, put-together, the kind of thing that said I meant to be here, dark tailored trousers, and boots that could handle wet pavement. She pinned her hair back with the decisive neatness of someone who had been arguing with it for half an hour and was done negotiating.
Downstairs, Sebastián, the driver her father had assigned, a quiet and patient man who had been waiting since 7:30am was standing by the matte black Range Rover with keys in hand.
"I'll drive myself," Cheryl said.
Sebastián blinked. "Señorita Cheryl, your father specifically asked …"
"I know what he asked. I'll be fine." She held out her hand for the keys. "I know the route. I have the address. I'm a perfectly competent driver."
A beat. Sebastián, who had worked for Luis Andrés Montoya Vélez long enough to recognize immovability when he saw it, handed over the keys.
"Thank you," Cheryl said pleasantly, and got in.
She was lost within six minutes.
The route had seemed simple enough on her phone; a clean series of turns, fifteen minutes, nothing complicated. What the map had not accounted for was the one-way street that appeared where it was not supposed to, or the construction that rerouted her three blocks east, or the fact that she missed a turn while trying to check if she'd missed a turn. By the time Princeton's Gothic stone buildings came into view through the windshield, grand and grey against an October sky, copper leaves scattered across paths where students moved with the easy confidence of people who knew exactly where they were going, Cheryl was seven minutes late and in entirely the wrong lane.
She pulled over to the first available curb she could find, grabbed her limited -edition bag, and stepped out of the car.
She did not see the puddle.
She heard the other car before she fully registered it, wheels moving fast through standing water, and then it hit: a wave of cold, grey water, thrown up from the road in a wide, indiscriminate arc, landing across her left side.
The cream blazer darkened instantly. Her trousers clung. There was water in her hair and boots.
Cheryl stood very still on the footpath outside Princeton University, soaking wet, on her first day, holding her bag, while two students nearby looked somewhere else with the quiet desperation of people who did not want to witness what was about to happen.
The car that had done it; dark, expensive, moving fast and it did not stop. Its owner just looked for an available parking spot.