That argument didnotmake Ashton feel better. “That’s my point—”
“Verdad.” Abuelita Bibi nodded and cast on a new color of yarn to her needles. She was taking advantage of the “cooler temperatures” of New York City to get some knitting done.
It was eighty-five degrees outside.
Then Abuelita Bibi turned on Ashton with that eagle-eyeddime el bochincheexpression she wore when she sniffed out gossip. “¿Y la mujer?”
“¿Qué mujer?” Did she mean Yadiel’s birth mom? The only people who knew her identity were sitting in this room. Ashton had given Yadi a choice, and the boy had decided he would wait until he was ten to be told. He viewed ten as some magical age where all sorts of information and skills—mostly regarding video games and skateboarding—would be unlocked for him.
“La nena de las telenovelas americanas,” Abuelita Bibi clarified. “Jasmita?”
“Jasmine.” Ashton corrected her before he could stop himself. The last thing he needed was his family making up nicknames for her.
“Sí.” Abuelita Bibi gave him a look like,¿Eres estúpido?“¿Pues? ¿La mujer?”
Ashton heaved a sigh. “We’re just...” The wordfriendsturned to ashes on his tongue. “No sé.”
He had no idea. In all likelihood, Jasmine would never want to speak to him again. Regret hung like a lead weight around his neck, but it was an emotion he didn’t have the bandwidth to indulge.
Abuelito Gus wiggled his eyebrows. “Ella es muy hermosa.”
It was on the tip of Ashton’s tongue to extol her other virtues. Yes, Jasmine was beautiful, but she was also so much more than—
Ashton sighed. They were trying to change the subject and get him to come clean on the truth about his tryst with Jasmine, but he wasn’t ready to do that yet. The wounds were toofresh, hastily bandaged so he could get through the current crisis. But sometime soon, he’d have to poke at them, and then he’d become fully aware of everything he’d sacrificed. He’d been fooling himself, thinking he could make room for her in his life.
You’re fooling yourself if you think you can live without her, a little voice whispered in the back of his mind, but Ashton slapped it away. He should have stuck to his policy.
Just in case he needed the reminder, he’d received a text that evening from a number with a Miami area code that readLeave me out of thisin Spanish.
It could only be from Yadiel’s mother.
Thoroughly exasperated, Ashton blurted out, “Am I theonlyone who remembers what happened before?”
Yadiel leaped off an armchair and crashed to the floor with a resounding thud that rattled everything on the coffee table. “What happened before?”
Carajo. Yadiel didn’t know about the attempted break-in. How could Ashton have been so careless? The weight of all these secrets was going to bury him.
Ashton wiped a hand over his face and said, again, “Mijo, this is an apartment. People live downstairs.”
Yadiel ignored him and bounced to his feet. “Papi, quiero visitar tu trabajo.”
This conversation was going off the rails. Just the thought of bringing his son to the studio now, when it was swarming with photographers and reporters and who knew what else, was enough to make him sweat. “No, mi amor. I’m sorry, but it’s not a good time for you to visit.”
“¿Por qué no?” Ignacio cut in. “Everyone knows about us now. Why can’t we visit the set?”
Ashton nearly choked. “We?”
“Sí, let’s all go.” Abuelita Bibi looked up from her knitting with an excited smile.
Yadiel cheered while Ashton panicked at the image of his worlds colliding. What would the cast and crew think? And, coño, what if they met Jasmine? His father would absolutely try to meddle.
Not to mention the potential for exposing them to the public, to the press, to... anyone with nefarious purposes.
“Espérate,” he began, but Ignacio got up and patted him on the shoulder.
“We’ll come tomorrow, okay?” Then he leaned in and said in a low voice, “The person you’re worried about is back injail.”
The person—did he mean the stalker? “How do you know?”
