Chapter Three: The Weight of Yesterday

Elena Rivera had always believed that shadows lingered longer in small towns. In the city, people could disappear into the hum of traffic, into glass towers and neon lights. But in her hometown , a sun-baked village tucked between hills and dry fields, every mistake clung to you like dust on your skin. Everyone knew your story. Everyone remembered.

She had been fourteen when her father sold her future.

The debt wasn’t spoken of in detail, but whispers floated through their narrow streets. Her father, Miguel Rivera, had borrowed heavily from a wealthy landowner, a man whose hands were already stained with too many lives. Don Isandro was his name older than her grandfather, with wives scattered across houses like trophies, children who barely knew each other’s names.

The night her father told her, Elena remembered the way the lamplight trembled against the cracked plaster walls. His face looked older than it should have, his shoulders slumped under burdens she couldn’t yet understand.

“Elena,” he said, his voice tight, “it is done. You will marry Don Isandro. This will free us. This will save us.”

At first she thought it was a cruel joke, but her father wasn’t a man who joked. She begged, she pleaded, but his eyes never softened. Poverty had carved away the tenderness from him, leaving only the raw desperation of survival.

The wedding was quick, as if speed could dull the edges of disgrace. She wore a white dress that wasn’t hers, stitched together from borrowed fabric. The town watched with the quiet hunger of gossip, and she felt every stare like a stone against her back.

Don Isandro barely looked at her. She was another acquisition, another piece of property folded into his wealth. The walls of his compound were high, but they couldn’t keep out her dread. Nights were the hardest when the house grew quiet, and she felt the weight of a life she had never chosen pressing down on her chest.

For three years, Elena endured.

At sixteen she was already old in spirit. She moved like a ghost through the compound, learning to make herself small, invisible. The other wives viewed her with suspicion, some with pity. The children of Don Isandro treated her as nothing more than an intruder in their sprawling, fractured family.

Her father came rarely to visit, and when he did, guilt shadowed his face. She wanted to scream at him, to claw the truth from his silence: Why me? Why your daughter? But the words never crossed her lips.

When Don Isandro finally released her, divorced, discarded like a broken toy, it wasn’t mercy. It was calculation. Her father had scraped together enough to settle the debt. The old man no longer needed her.

By then, something inside Elena had hardened. Trust became a foreign language. Love, a myth told to children before they understood the currency of betrayal. Even after she left the compound, returned to her father’s small home, she never forgave him. She carried her silence like armor, cold and impenetrable.

She left the town soon after, chasing a life that was hers alone. She worked, studied, she traveled, she buried herself in art and words. In every city she lived, she built walls around her heart, telling herself that no man could ever breach them. To love was to risk chains; to trust was to invite ruin.

And yet Harry DuBois.

The first time she stepped into his lounge, she hadn’t expected him. Tall, sharp, dressed with a precision that spoke of both pride and defense. His presence filled a room even when he said nothing, and his silence carried the weight of untold stories.

Something in her chest stirred, something dangerous. It terrified her because it was familiar. She had felt it once, long ago, before her father’s betrayal stripped her of girlhood and innocence. She had looked at a boy in her town square once, a boy with dark eyes and a smile that promised mischief, and for a fleeting second, she had believed in futures. That feeling had died before it had a chance to bloom. But now, standing in the presence of Harry, it stirred again.

She tried to resist it. She told herself he was just another man, another storm dressed in a suit. But her defenses cracked every time he looked at her, not with hunger or possession, but with a weariness she recognized in her own reflection.

Loneliness.

It was loneliness that bridged the distance between them, a shared silence that spoke louder than words. She saw it in the way he carried himself, as though burdened by ghosts. She felt it in his hesitation, his refusal to let anyone see too deeply. It mirrored her own fears, her own refusal to forgive.

And still, her heart betrayed her.

The way his voice lowered when he spoke to her. The way his eyes softened when Naomi teased him. The way he seemed both fortress and fragile all at once. Every detail chipped at the walls she had built, melting her armor like frost under morning light.

Elena knew the risk. To let Harry in was to surrender the safety she had spent years constructing. But every time she caught him staring across the room, every time his guarded smile lingered just a second too long, she wondered if maybe, just maybe this was different.

But the past never leaves quietly.

One evening, alone in her apartment, Elena opened the folder she kept tucked away at the bottom of her desk drawer. Inside lay remnants of the life she had fled: a faded wedding photograph, her father’s signature on the marriage contract, a letter he had written years later, begging forgiveness she could never give.

She touched the paper, tracing the lines of her father’s handwriting. Her chest tightened with a mix of rage and sorrow. Part of her longed to tear the letter into pieces, to scatter it like ash. Another part wanted to hold it close, to remember that even betrayal had once worn the face of love.

And beneath it all, her thoughts drifted back to Harry. To his eyes, the ones that seemed to ask for nothing yet revealed everything.

Could she trust him? Could she risk being wrong again?

She pressed the folder shut, sliding it back into the shadows of the drawer. Her lips whispered into the empty room, half a vow, half a confession.

“Harry DuBois… don’t make me believe in something I can’t survive losing.”