Rosa

Her mother's apartment is a twenty-minute metro ride from campus, which Valentina made approximately once a month in her first life and which she has already decided, sitting on the orange plastic seat of the L3 on a Wednesday morning, to make every week from now on.

This is not a dramatic resolution. It does not feel like atonement. It feels like the most obvious correction she can make — the one that costs nothing except showing up — and the fact that it took her forty-five years to understand the value of showing up is something she intends to sit with quietly for the rest of this life.

Rosa Serra lives in Sant Andreu, on the third floor of a building with a lift that works two days out of three. The apartment has one bedroom, a kitchen that doubles as a dining room, and a window in the living room that catches the afternoon light at an angle that makes everything look like a painting of itself. Valentina grew up in that light. She stopped noticing it somewhere in her late twenties and did not think about it again until she was lying on a different ceiling, looking at a crack, and understanding that she had let too many beautiful ordinary things become invisible.

She rings the buzzer at ten past nine.

A pause. Then: "¿Quién es?" Who is it?

"Soc jo, mama." It's me, Mom.

Another pause — longer, the kind that means recalibration. Valentina imagines her mother on the other side of the intercom, working out what a Wednesday morning visit means, running through the list of possible emergencies and finding none of them quite fitting.

The door clicks open without another word.

Rosa is in her housecoat when Valentina reaches the third floor, the blue one with the white piping that she wears until eleven regardless of plans, a habit left over from years of working evenings. She is fifty-two years old and looks it — not in a defeated way, but in the way of someone who has spent their energy on things that mattered and kept very little in reserve for appearances. Her hair is the same dark that Valentina inherited, threaded through with grey, she has never bothered to cover.

She looks at her daughter for a moment with the particular assessment of a woman who raised a child alone and learned to diagnose problems from posture.

"Has passat alguna cosa?" What happened?

"No," Valentina says. "Nothing happened. I just wanted to come."

Rosa considers this. "I have coffee," she says finally, and steps back from the door.

The apartment is exactly as Valentina remembers it from this year: the ceramic tiles her mother found at a market in Poblenou and installed herself over a long weekend, the shelf of paperback novels organised by colour because Rosa said the spines were decoration, the photograph on the wall above the television — Valentina at seven, gap-toothed, sitting on the shoulders of a man she only partly remembers. Jordi Serra, who died of a heart attack at thirty-four and left behind a wife, a daughter, and a life insurance policy that covered fourteen months of rent.

Valentina looks at the photograph while her mother makes coffee. She has her father's hands, she was always told. Looking at the photograph now, she thinks she also has his expression — the slightly too-alert look of someone paying close attention to things other people have stopped seeing.

"Seu,"(Sit.)Rosa says, returning with two cups. 

They sit at the kitchen table, which has a plastic tablecloth with a pattern of lemons on it that Valentina has always considered deeply ugly and has never once said so. She wraps her hands around the cup. The coffee is strong and slightly over-extracted, exactly the way her mother has always made it, and the familiarity of it hits her somewhere behind the sternum.

"Com van les classes?" Rosa asks. How are the classes?

"Bé. I've been paying attention more."

Her mother raises an eyebrow fractionally. "More than usual."

"More than usual."

Rosa nods slowly, in the way of a woman who accepts answers she doesn't quite believe and waits for the real one. Valentina has spent twenty-five years finding this patience maddening. She finds it today, instead, quietly extraordinary — the discipline of a person who has learned that pressure rarely produces honesty and that silence usually does.

"I've been thinking about what I want," Valentina says. "What I actually want. Not just what's in front of me."

Her mother looks at her over the rim of the cup. Something shifts in her expression — not surprise exactly, but recognition, the way you recognise a song from the first three notes.

"I've been thinking about that since I was twenty," Rosa says. A pause. "It gets easier when you stop asking permission."

Valentina stares at her.

In her entire first life, she cannot remember her mother saying anything like that. She cannot remember asking, which is its own kind of answer. She visited once a month, asked how classes were going, ate whatever was on the stove, and left without ever once treating her mother as a person who might have something worth hearing.

"Mama," she says. "What did you want? When you were twenty."

Rosa is quiet for long enough that Valentina thinks she won't answer. Then: "To go to the coast. To live somewhere I could hear the water." She sets down her cup. "I wanted a lot of things. Life was faster than wanting."

Valentina thinks about the epilogue she is trying to build — the version of this life where the loops are closed, where the things left undone get done. She thinks about Rosa at fifty-two in this kitchen, in this apartment in Sant Andreu that is perfectly fine and nowhere near the coast.

"We should go," Valentina says. "To the coast. For your birthday."

Her mother's birthday is in March. It is currently October. Rosa looks at her daughter with the expression of someone trying to decide whether to take the offer seriously or file it gently under things that don't happen.

"Your birthday present," Valentina says. "I'll organise it. We'll go to Cadaqués, or Begur, wherever you want."

Rosa picks up her coffee. Sets it down again. When she looks up, her eyes are doing something that Valentina recognises as the thing her mother does instead of crying in front of people — a slight tightening, a deliberate blink, a return to steadiness.

"Begur," she says. "I've always wanted to see Begur."

"Begur," Valentina confirms.

They finish their coffee. Rosa tells her about a dress she's been asked to alter — complicated beadwork, a woman getting married for the second time, which Rosa considers both brave and impractical. Valentina listens to all of it. She asks questions she has never asked before, about the work, about the neighbourhood, about the woman upstairs whose name she has never once learned.

When she leaves at eleven, her mother stands at the door of the apartment and watches her go, which she has always done and which Valentina has always walked away from without looking back.

Today she turns at the top of the stairs.

Rosa raises one hand — a small gesture, unpracticed, like a thing she'd stopped expecting to use.

Valentina raises hers back.

On the metro home, she opens her notebook to a clean page and writes one word at the top, underlined twice:

Begur.

Below it, smaller: the ROTC application deadline. A note about her course schedule. The name of the professor she needs to speak to about a letter of recommendation, she already knows she'll need.

The list is not a list of regrets anymore.

It is a plan.