The End of Us, The Start of Me

I sat on a slick wooden bench on a Boston sidewalk, my watch telling me it was well past midnight, and the only things keeping me company were a streetlamp and the constant buzz of phone notifications going off like a curse.

My boyfriend was being kissed by an influencer on a five-inch screen.

I stared at the photo for the … God, I’d lost count.

Zachary de Sanctis. His mouth on a blonde whose bra probably cost more than half of an average MIT student’s tuition. The background: a victory party. Italian flags. Balloons. An F1 team logo I thought only existed on TV.

The caption burning in the corner:

“Victory party after big bro’s win. Your boy knows how to celebrate.”

Sent by: Maya.

My fingers tightened around the phone until my knuckles went white. The Boston night wind whipped my hair and cut straight through my sweater, but the heat behind my eyes hurt more.

Shit.

Next photo. Swipe.

Zach on a leather couch, champagne bottle in hand, the blonde perched on his lap, her dress riding way too high. His hand on her thigh. That thin smile I knew, but not the version he ever gave me.

Next photo. Swipe.

Them dancing in a club. Strobe lights. Bodies pressed together. Zach’s hand on her waist. His eyes half-lidded, jaw tight.

Swipe. Video.

I held my breath and hit play. Heavy club music. People shouting. The camera shaking. Zach leaning against a wall while the blonde kissed his neck. More hands in the shot, cheering. Someone yelled in Italian, zero subtitles needed:

“Zach, portala su! Non farci aspettare!”

‘Take her upstairs. Don’t make us wait.’

I paused the video on the frame where Zach let out a low laugh, grabbed the girl’s hand, and disappeared down the hallway toward the hotel rooms.

The worst part wasn’t the video. It wasn’t even the photo of them leaving the hotel later, laughing, her hair a mess and Zach’s shirt half-buttoned.

The worst part was the long text that came after everything.

From Maya :

“Ara, I don’t know how to say this. But you need to see it. It’s been four months.

Four. Months. This isn’t just flirting. Zach’s own little brother said the De Sanctis family already knows about Zach and ‘the influencer girl,’ and they A-P-P-R-O-V-E. They don’t approve of you. They said you’re not from ‘their circle.’ Sorry, babe. But you had to know.”

Four months.

Four months of me being the joke of some European aristocrat family with great fashion sense and rotten morals.

“Malditos europeos de m****a,” I muttered, voice rough. “Pendejos.”

I leaned back against the bench and closed my eyes, counting my breaths.

Don’t cry. Tears aren’t for him. Not for a man who could disappear into a hotel room with someone else while his ring was still on my finger.

The ring felt heavy tonight. The cold metal pressed into my skin, reminding me I’d once said “yes” to a man who couldn’t keep his zipper shut.

My stomach felt strange. Two months. Two red lines on the test I’d stared at for half an hour before getting ready for the graduation party.

Two months, and I’d spent half the night trying to figure out the most dramatic but still elegant way to tell Zach he was going to be a father.

Original plan: Tell him at the graduation party. A hug in the kitchen, whisper in his ear: “We didn’t just graduate, Zach. There’s three of us now.”

New plan: Sit alone on an old Boston bench, swearing, questioning my brain’s taste in men.

Zach was thirty minutes late.

He was the one who asked to meet “somewhere quiet” after the party. He’d texted before I left: “Bench near the river? Need you.”

Interesting. Turns out what he needed wasn’t me, maybe a chance to wash off his sins… or collect new ones.

I opened Maya’s last text. There was a screenshot of her chat with Zach’s brother.

“He said the family finally knows about ‘that Latina girl from MIT.’ They said she’s… not on our level.  Not like the influencer. They’re okay with the influencer. But not her.”

I let out a short, empty laugh.

Not on their level.

If they knew my real last name, they’d probably faint and then send a fruit basket to Bogotá.

Gómez.

A family name that still shows up in every Latin American business magazine. A name I left at the airport when I flew to Boston four years ago and signed myself in as Arabella Torres (my mother’s last name). Not Gómez. Nothing but an IT student on a merit scholarship who worked part-time in a lab.

Funny. Europe’s richest family thought I wasn’t “wealthy enough” for their middle son.

Without meaning to, my mouth curved. There was a part of me that wanted to stand in front of them, drop a Forbes report onto their dinner table, and say: Surprise, cabrones.

Headlights cut across the street, approaching. A black sedan stopped in front of the bench. The driver’s door opened, and Zach stepped out.

Black jeans, a white t-shirt that fit too well across his chest and shoulders, that leather jacket that had spent way too much time pressed against my body too. His dark hair was slightly messy, his face tired but still so… stupidly beautiful. Handsome was too stiff a word for a sharp jaw, a straight nose, and those sharp blue eyes.

I hated that my knees still went a little weak when I saw him.

“Bella,” he said, voice low, that Italian accent smacking me with memories. “You cold?”

I was burning alive.

“I’m fine.” My voice was flat. “You’re late.”

He exhaled, walking closer. The scent of expensive cologne, the same one that lived in his apartment pillows, hit me.

“Sorry.” He sat beside me, leaving half a meter between us. “Something… came up.”

“Something,” I echoed. “Nice, vague word.”

I stared straight ahead at the Boston city lights reflecting off the glass of the tall buildings. My phone was still clenched in my hand.

“How was the party?” Zach asked quietly. “Maya being dramatic?”

“Maya is always dramatic.” I went sweet on purpose.

Strangely, that made Zach’s back stiffen. He studied my profile. I felt it like a physical touch on my skin. The corner of his mouth twitched the way it always did when he was trying to read my mind.

“Bella.” His voice shifted, careful. “What’s going on?”

I tilted my head to look at him. His blue eyes were darker under the streetlamp, his jaw tight. His skin was slightly tanned from shuttling back and forth to Europe for his older brother’s races. He looked tired, too perfect for a man I’d just watched being kissed by a blonde stranger on video.

“Funny,” I said, dry. “You’re usually the one who knows what’s wrong with me before I realize it myself. Now you’re… four months behind.”

His brows pulled together. “What do you mean?”

I lifted my phone between us.

The screen lit up, showing the first photo.

And in the next second, everything familiar shifted into something foreign.

Zach’s jaw tightened, his pupils shrinking. He stared at the screen without blinking.

A thin wire of tension crackled through the air.

I swiped.

Another photo.

A video.

The bass from the club leaked out of my phone’s tiny speaker. Her hands on his body. His hands on hers. A hotel hallway.

I paused the video again and lowered the phone.

“Do you want to explain?” I asked calmly.

He drew in a breath, his eyes lifting to my face. “Bella…”

“Please,” I cut in. “Spare me the ‘this isn’t what it looks like.’ I go to MIT, not a school that offers Intro to Stupidity.”

Something flickered in his gaze: frustration, guilt, ego elbowing each other for space.

Or maybe I was just too stupid to read it clearly anymore.

“It was…” His jaw flexed. “It was a victory party. Everyone—”

“Everyone kisses half-naked influencers and goes upstairs to hotel rooms?” I sliced through his excuse with a dry smile. “Let me know so I can write a paper on European culture.”

“Bella.” His tone sharpened. “We just graduated. My brother just won the championship. It was… things got out of hand. I was drunk. Everyone—”

“You want me to believe you weren’t aware when you let someone else’s tongue into your mouth and walked in a straight line toward the hotel elevator?” I snapped.

He held my gaze. “It was wrong. I know that. But I’m going to fix it. That’s why I wanted to meet tonight.”

A short laugh burst out of me, icy enough to cut the air. “Fix it? What, you’re going to tell me that for four months you just… slipped? Repeatedly? Into the same bed?”

His expression changed when I said four months. A flicker of surprise, gone in a second. “What did Maya tell you?”

“Enough.” I leaned back against the bench, staring up at the sky. “Enough to make me realize I have truly awful taste in white men with blue passports.”

“Bella.” This time his voice dropped, a warning. He hated when I went after his precious European family. Too bad I’d run out of manners tonight. “Don’t start bringing—”

“Oh, relax.” I lowered my gaze to meet his again. “I haven’t even started. I haven’t mentioned the part where your old-money family decided they’re too high up to accept a Latina from MIT. A Latina who is… what did your brother say? ‘Not on our level’? Not like the influencer they prefer?”

Zach went rigid like he’d been shot. His breath stopped. “Nathan said… what?”

“Verbatim?” I pretended to think. “He said your family already knows about ‘the Latina girl from MIT’ and they think you can do better. They approve of your thing with the influencer. I didn’t even get a family meeting invite.”

Saying the words out loud cracked something in my chest. My cynical laugh echoed like it belonged in an empty room.

All this time, I’d never cared about the last name buried in my passport.  Not when I turned down Abuelo’s offer. Not when I chose a ramen-scented dorm over my family’s penthouse in New York.

And... now I wanted to shove my bank statement in the De Sanctis family’s faces. It tasted… sweet.

Zach dragged a rough hand over his face and took a long breath. “Bella, you know my family. They—”

“Racist? Arrogant? Have terrible taste?” I offered. “Yeah, I’m starting to see the pattern, gracias.”

“Stop.” He looked at me, exhausted. “They just… they have expectations. They think I should be with someone from… our world.”

I tilted my head. “Your world.”

“Bella—”

“Funny.” I lifted my hand and showed him the ring on my finger. “Because three months ago, on your apartment balcony, you said our world belonged to the two of us.”

He exhaled slowly, like the memory was too heavy. “I meant it.”

“Did you?” My smile sharpened. “And last night you also ‘meant it’ when you slid your hand up that woman’s dress?”

Zach’s expression hardened, inch by inch. I watched something lock into place behind that cool, lethal charm that had dragged so many women down with him. Too many times, including me.

“So that’s it?” he said, voice suddenly cold. “You’re interrogating me like I’m a murder suspect? Over a few drunk party videos?”

I leaned forward. “A few drunk party videos over four months, Zach. Four. This isn’t one college movie night gone wrong. Four months of you disappearing on ‘family business’ in Milan, Monaco, Paris. Four months of dropped calls and ‘I’m tired.’ Turns out you were tired because you were busy… what’s the polite term? Testing hotel mattress quality?”

His jaw ticked once. “You’re being dramatic.”

“And you’re being an asshole.”

Silence dropped between us. The wind tugged at the hem of his jacket, blew loose strands of my hair out of my ponytail. Our breaths slipped out as faint white clouds.

“I never promised to be a saint, Bella,” he said, voice falling into something cold. “You knew that from the start. I never told you I’d only sleep with one person.”

His words cut slow, precise. I stared at him, breath catching in my chest.

“No,” I whispered. “What you said was… you were going to marry me.”

He let out a low, rough laugh, the kind that carried pure mockery. “We joked about a lot of things back then,” he said. “We were in college. It’s college, Bella. Not a business contract. You seriously believed all that romantic crap?”

Something soft inside me slammed shut.

Click.

“So I…” I swallowed. “For three years, I was just… what? Entertainment? A side project? A hobby?”

He gave the smallest shrug. A tiny movement I wanted to burn out of my memory. “We had fun. You knew what you were getting into. Don’t act like a victim here.”

Victim.

A brittle laugh cracked out of me, sharp enough to scrape my throat. Because if it wasn’t a laugh, it would’ve been something violent.

“You’re right,” I nodded slowly. “I’m not a victim.”

I stood up.

Zach followed suit. “Bella.”

I grabbed his hand and yanked him closer. He startled but didn’t pull away. For one second, instinct made his body lean toward mine.

A second I’ll regret for the rest of my life.

I pulled back my fist and slammed it into his jaw.

The thud of bone on bone was deeply satisfying, the kind of sound that would make my abuelo in Bogotá send me a brand-new rosary. Pain shot through my knuckles, but the freedom that flooded in with it felt… clean.

Zach staggered back, shocked. His hand flew to his jaw. “What the—”

“Cállate,” I hissed. “You’ve said enough bullshit for one night.”

His breathing hitched. His blue-gray eyes burned with anger, the look he usually wore when dealing with people he didn’t respect, or when someone insulted his family. Now that look was aimed entirely at me.

Good.

Let him be angry.

I’m angrier.

I reached for the ring on my finger. The simple white-gold band with a single diamond he’d slid onto my hand on his penthouse balcony, breath warm on my neck, whispering sweet words that now felt like lines from a cheap script.

With one sharp movement, I pulled the ring off.  “When you gave me this,” I said, voice steady despite the shaking in my chest, “you said I was the only thing in your life that made sense.”

“Bella, don’t—”

I threw the ring at his face.

The metal hit his cheekbone before dropping to the pavement with a tiny sound swallowed by distant traffic. Zach swore, hand flying up to his cheek.

“Now,” I lifted my chin, letting each word land sharp, “keep the ring. Give it to your influencer. Or whoever your family thinks is ‘on your level.’ I hope they know how to manage an Italian asshole who can’t keep his pants closed.”

“Bella!” he barked.

I stepped back, looking at him one last time. His jaw was bruising. His cheek was red. His eyes locked on me like I was the one who had shattered his world.

Irony was cruel.

“There’s one thing you got right, Zach,” I said. “This isn’t a contract. Nothing ties me to someone who decided I was just entertainment.”

I turned and walked away before he could reach for me again. My boots hit the asphalt in sharp, final beats, the sound of nails sealing a coffin.

Under my sweater, a faint movement fluttered in my belly, more tremor than kick.

Still too early for that. But somehow, my body already knew there were lives inside me that, as of tonight, no longer belonged to him.

“Bella!”

I didn’t look back.

Maldito. Cabrón. Pendejo italiano arrogante.

I would bring this child into the world without his name anywhere near the birth certificate.

He wouldn’t know.

His family wouldn’t know.

Zachary de Sanctis’s world would keep spinning in its expensive, empty orbit.

Mine would burn..and then I’d rebuild it in the morning, without him.