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“Hey Alicia, you’re going out to do the Calderón piece today, right?”
Alicia looked up from her notepad at Andrés Reyes, the young reporter who was always trying to pitch stories around the newsroom. He generally had good ideas, but nothing to back them up.
“Sí, I’m heading there right now,” she said, stuffing her bag way past its capacity with extra voice recorders.
“Can I come with you?”
“I don’t think so, Andrés…”
“Alicia, please,” he whined, swaying back and forth on the ball of his feet. “If I have to write one more ‘what dessert are you?’ article I’m going to scream.”
Alicia sighed, taking a quick look around before leaning in and whispering to him.
“Andrés, can you keep a secret?,” she asked, and Andrés quickly nodded. “I’m not going there to write a fluff piece about the history of La Casa Rosa. I’m trying to get some dirt out of them. So no, you can’t come with me this time, okay?”
Andrés’ eyes bugged out. “Dirt? What dirt?”
“You’ll see,” Alicia winked, picking up her phone and shouldering her bag. “Keep at it, Andrés. Soon you’ll find your own stories.”
Before he could insist any further, Alicia took a quick exit. She needed to focus. This would not be a simple task. Trying to trick swindlers was a mission and a half, but she was determined to get something out of them.
Alicia had an extensive file of investigative work that had taken the better part of a year to collect. She knew the Calderóns were crooks, but they were smart about it. There wasn’t much of a trail to follow, and it had taken a lot of arguing and persistence for Alicia to convince her editor that she had enough to see this through.
So when she walked into La Casa Rosa, Alicia felt like she’d already made a major breakthrough, but it was still an overwhelming experience. She’d never seen such an obnoxious display of wealth from this up-close; the house was grand, and Alicia felt insignificantly small.
A young maid led her from the front door through the sitting room and into a library with bookshelves so tall it reminded her of Beauty & The Beast. Though she wasn’t being held captive, she half-expected a bipedal monster to jump out at her.
Instead, she got the demure maid again, followed by the one and only Luisa Calderón herself.
Luisa was taller than she realized, dressed in a perfectly tailored sleeveless, pink dress with a sculptural front that seemed too elegant for a simple house visit, but Alicia doubted Luisa was the type to dress down.
The thing that was the most surprising, however, was the width of Luisa’s smile and how genuinely happy she looked. Alicia was taken aback by the force of it. She’d expected Luisa to be cold and standoffish, but she approached Alicia with open arms and a friendly disposition.
“Welcome to La Casa Rosa,” Luisa said, as grand as everything around them. “I’m Luisa Calderón.”
“Hello,” Alicia said, struck, and shook Luisa’s hand. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m Alicia Mendez.”
“I’ve heard a lot about you, Señorita Mendez,” she said, smug. “Would you like something to drink? It’s so hot today! We have lemonade, iced tea, or maybe some water?”
“Some iced tea would be great.”
Luisa turned back to her maid with a flourish. “Maria del Carmen. Bring us a jar of iced tea and some biscuits.”
“Sí, señora Luisa,” she replied meekly before skittering away.
“So, Señorita Mendez,” Luisa started. “Have a seat.”
She did, letting her heavy bag fall at her feet with a dull thud. “Please, call me Alicia.”
Luisa took a seat across from her. “Alicia. Here we are. This is La Casa Rosa.”
Alicia had emailed Luisa about her interest in “studying La Casa Rosa and its history”, and requested a sit-down interview with both Luisa and her husband, Esteban. It didn’t seem like anyone else was joining them, though, and Alicia hesitated.
“Shouldn’t we wait for your husband?”
Luisa’s brow creased, lips pursuing. “Esteban’s going to be late, so we better start without him.”
That caught Alicia off guard, but she quickly fished her notepad from her bag and looked through all her questions. It was with sinking dread that she realized most of her questions were for Esteban.
She’d have to think on her feet for this one.
“Señora Calderón, I think we could start by getting to know you a little better,” Alicia said brightly, pulling out a voice recorder and setting it on the table between them.
“Call me Luisa,” she waved a hand with a light laugh. “And me? You think your readers would be interested in reading about me?”
“I’m sure they would. The Calderón family can come across as very mysterious to some people.”
Luisa’s eyelashes fluttered, and she smirked. “Mysterious? Well, women have to keep some secrets.”
“Yes, of course,” Alicia perked up. “Do you think we could explore some of these secrets?”
“That sounds indecent, Señorita Mendez,” she said, voice low and gaze heavy.
Alicia blinked rapidly. Was Luisa flirting with her?
She almost jumped out of her seat when the small maid from earlier walked in holding a serving tray that looked way too big and heavy for her to be carrying on her own.
Alicia’s first instinct was to get up to help the girl, but before she could move, the maid was already stumbling through the room, trying to reach the coffee table as fast as she could while balancing everything.
She was almost successful in her venture, but at the last moment, the tray hit the corner of the table and the sugar tin tipped over. Alicia watched in abject horror as sugar spilled like quicksand onto the very expensive-looking rug under their feet.
“Lo siento, señora Luisa,” she squeaked, falling to her knees and trying to sweep the sugar back into the tin with her hands.
“Stupid, stupid girl,” Luisa fumed, voice rising, and Alicia braced herself for the explosion.
But something shifted right before her eyes, and the anger that’d struck Luisa’s body seemed to melt away after a few slow breaths.
“Don’t worry about it,” Luisa said, voice strained but calm. “You can vacuum this later. Let Alicia and I finish our conversation.”
The young maid did an awkward half-nod, half-bow and all but ran out of the room.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” Luisa said with a forced smile. “I didn’t mean to snap. I’m trying to be a nice person, but some days it is really hard.”
“You’re trying to be a nice person?”
Luisa shifted uncomfortably, busying herself with serving two glasses of iced tea. “I’ve burned some bridges and made some choices in the past that I regret,” she said, not looking at Alicia. “I’m trying not to make the same mistakes again and be nicer. But that’s boring, you probably don’t want to talk about that.”
“No, that’s not boring at all. It sounds very interesting,” Alicia picked up a pen. “What mistakes?”
“Bueno,” she scowled. “I don’t understand journalism so I won’t tell you how to do your job, but there’s nothing interesting about it.”
“Señora Calderón— “
“Luisa.”
“Claro. Luisa,” Alicia smiled tentatively. “As I was saying, I think people would be very interested in getting to know you better. Vulnerability is great for stories like this.”
“Vulnerability,” Luisa scoffed. “My therapist loves that word.”
“Your therapist?”
“Sí, sí, she’s always going on and on about trauma and how everybody has problems and it’s okay to be vulnerable, that it doesn’t make me weak .”
“It doesn’t. It makes you relatable.”
“Right. Relatable. That’s a very millennial word.”
Alicia chuckled. “Well, I am a millennial.”
“Ah. So you probably know everything about it. My therapist says that it’s very common for people your age to have daddy issues.”
“I don’t think that’s an age-specific thing,” she paused. “Did you have problems with your father?”
“Problems? I don’t have any problems, and this has nothing to do with my father,” Luisa snarled, lips curling. “I just hear his voice calling me useless every time I look at myself in the mirror, and in my dreams, and any time there’s a lull in a conversation.”
She paused.
“Like right now.”
“Oh,” Alicia gaped.
Alicia wasn’t in the business of sympathizing with rich people, much less rich people who were potentially involved in some very serious, shady dealings. But Luisa had already surprised her a handful of times in the last half hour, so feeling sympathetic towards this particular show of flawed humanity was natural for an empath like Alicia.
“Don’t print that,” Luisa quickly added, looking panicked.
“Okay. Off the record, then,” she said reassuringly. “What about Esteban?”
Luisa’s mood instantly changed again, going from discomfort to clear disapproval. Alicia hadn’t expected the woman to be so open with her body language, but she’d been able to pinpoint her moods from the second she walked in.
Wealthy people were usually so guarded, but Luisa behaved like someone who had nothing to hide. Had Alicia’s instincts been wrong?
“What about Esteban?,” Luisa spat.
“Is he coming? I had a few questions for him.”
“I don’t know, I’m not his keeper. Whatever it is you want to ask him, you can ask me,” she said, spiteful. “This is my family’s home. I know more about it than him.”
“Okay. Bueno. The questions I had for him weren’t about the house,” Alicia started, keeping an eye on Luisa’s reactions. “What do you know about Esteban’s donations to Christian camps that implement controversial conversion therapy on children?”
“What? What camps?”
“These are gay conversion camps which perform cruel, awful acts on kids,” Alicia said. She pulled the documents she’d compiled and handed it to Luisa. She saw confusion, anger, disgust, all flood Luisa’s face at once as she looked through the files. “Three took their own lives because of the trauma they suffered, and a fourth one is missing. Her name is Gabby Cabrera.”
Luisa pushed the documents away, onto the table, and stood up. She started pacing, a hand over her mouth. It sounded like she was muttering to herself, but Alicia couldn’t make out a word. She looked like a woman on the verge of a panic attack.
“I know nothing about that,” Luisa’s voice cracked. “That’s horrible. I doubt Esteban is involved in anything like that.”
“I found records that showed he made dozens of donations every year. Thousands of dollars.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. This is fake news,” she started gesticulating wildly, voice rising and reaching a shrill note. “You’re making things up. I think you should leave.”
“No, Luisa, please,” Alicia stood up. “Do you know anything about this? We can speak off the record. Or I can cite you as an anonymous source. Nobody has to know it came from you. Por favor, Luisa…”
“Ya basta! Get out of my house!,” Luisa yelled. “I don’t have to listen to these horrid accusations. Leave now or I’m calling the police.”
Luisa looked like a caged animal, lashing out, pacing and thrashing. Alicia took a step back, defeated. Luisa didn’t know anything, Alicia was sure of that, and she’d just unveiled something potentially devastating.
“Lo siento,” she whispered, trying not to aggravate the woman any further. “Luisa, if you really didn’t know about this… I am so sorry. Thank you for your time.”
With that, Alicia picked up her stuff as fast as she could, but made no noise.
She left feeling listless, sparing Luisa one last look before she closed the door behind herself.
What Alicia thought would be her big break turned into a problem that was much bigger than she could ever have predicted.
Two months later, Alicia had made a clear separation between her life before she met Luisa Calderón and after she met Luisa Calderón, mainly because the woman was now a constant presence in her thoughts.
She had stopped preaching about the Calderóns around the newsroom. She avoided any material that came in about them. When her editor asked to see the transcript of the interview with Luisa, Alicia’s insolent reaction earned her a suspension.
Alicia felt uncharacteristically guilty about what she’d done and protective of her source and the material she’d collected. Luisa clearly didn’t know about what Esteban was doing, and the last thing Alicia wanted was for anyone to turn the woman into a pitiful victim.
So when her inbox pinged with a new email from Luisa, Alicia’s body stiffened. Part of her expected a lawsuit, something to keep her quiet, but what came was the invitation to return to La Casa Rosa for another conversation. That was as shocking as receiving the email in the first place, but Alicia quickly replied with a resounding yes.
The scene repeated itself. Alicia was in the grand library inside an even grander mansion, Luisa sitting across from her wearing another beautifully fitted dress, a tray of tea between them - without the spilled sugar this time.
The silence was harrowing. Luisa was looking at her with the most intense brown eyes she had ever seen. And Alicia’s stomach was fluttering with a fizz of anxiety like nothing she’d ever felt before.
Luisa stood up and walked across the room towards an antique-looking chest of drawers. Alicia watched every movement she made and perked up when she returned with a thick file in hand, then set it on the coffee table in front of Alicia.
“Esteban has been having an affair,” Luisa started. “That part is off the records. This is your headline: we’re getting a divorce.”
Alicia wasn’t interested in gossip news, but the wealthiest, most powerful couple in Miami getting a divorce was big enough to shake Miami’s politics and the economy, so she would take that gladly.
She silently pulled out her voice recorder, a pen and her notepad, then looked at Luisa again, waiting.
“I found these,” Luisa pushed the files closer to her. “Shady tax returns, off-shore accounts, receipts from his donations to that camp you mentioned.”
There was another long pause where they simply looked at each other until Luisa let out a tired sigh and sat back in her seat with slumped shoulders.
“You gave me a lot to think about the last time I saw you,” she said, still sounding tense. “Esteban and I haven’t been happy for a very long time, and I knew he kept secrets from me. So I started looking for what I’ve always been too afraid to find.”
“And you want me to use this?,” Alicia asked, picking up the files.
“Is it worth anything?”
Alicia was about to lose her mind, but reined it in. “Definitely. It has a lot of potential. But I need to know if you’ve ever been involved in any of this. If you have, it’s better if I cite you as an anonymous source.”
“I didn’t know anything about any of it. The affair, the donations, the money. My money,” she scoffed. “He’s been stealing from me for years.”
“Is that on the record?”
“Can’t we just have a conversation?,” Luisa snapped.
“I — I’m sorry. Of course,” Alicia set her notepad aside and picked up a cup of tea. Luisa looked satisfied with that. “Continue.”
“I thought it was because of me that our marriage wasn’t working. That he resented me for my mistakes, for being so much like my father sometimes. But he’s been lying the entire time.”
Alicia nodded. “Luisa, I know a lot more about Esteban than you’d guess.”
“What does that mean?,” Luisa asked, shrill, eyes narrowed.
“I know who he was having an affair with.”
Luisa stood up then and started pacing, much like she had two months ago. She looked distressed and Alicia didn’t know what to do, but she wanted to console her somehow.
“Please, don’t kick me out again,” she mumbled.
“I won’t. At least you’re honest,” Luisa threw her hands up, frustrated. “That’s something new. Who else knows?”
“I didn’t tell anyone what I found out, so nobody heard it from me. Some other people might have figured it out too, though. I have to say they weren’t very discreet.”
“No,” Luisa laughed humorlessly. “I’m just stupid.”
“You’re not stupid,” Alicia stood up. “It’s not your fault you thought your husband would be honest and faithful to you.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you really knew him,” she sniffed. “I should have known.”
Alicia watched in despair as Luisa fell apart. She sobbed, shoulders shaking as she crumbled. Luisa reached for the arm of her chair and missed it, almost falling over, but Alicia grabbed her hand in time.
“I know men like him,” she whispered. “Trust me. This is nobody’s fault but his.”
Luisa managed a weak smile, then, much to Alicia’s surprise, hugged her. “Thank you.”
Alicia had never done this before. Never in her professional career had she ever brought her work to be approved by a source before publishing. If her editor found out, she’d be out in the dog-house for the foreseeable future. But before Alicia could even start second-guessing herself, she was knocking at Luisa’s door, article in hand.
Now she was sitting in front of the Calderón matriarch again, watching as she read her words, and Alicia’s heart was pounding so hard she could hear it in her own ears.
When Luisa finished, she looked up with tears in her eyes, and Alicia’s breath caught.
“Esteban is going to hate this,” she said, and smiled through her tears.
Alicia couldn’t help herself. She laughed. A wave of relief washed through her when Luisa laughed with her, a bright sound that was so contagious it made Alicia laugh even harder.
Maybe they were both a little hysterical, but for the first time in months Alicia felt like she’d done the right thing.
“Thank you for this,” Luisa said. She was glowing. “I was scared of how I would be perceived in this because I enabled him and all his wrongdoings, but I think you did a great job of relaying the facts without villainizing him. Or victimizing me.”
“Thank you,” she smiled. Alicia was proud of her work, but the validation made her stomach flutter pleasantly.
Luisa sighed sadly, but she looked lighter. “I really loved him, you know.”
“I know. And he knew it, too.”
“He used it against me,” Luisa’s smile trembled, and Alicia felt the inane urge to punch Esteban right in the gut. “But with your help I’m going to be free from all of this, and I can’t wait.”
“Thank you for trusting me, Luisa. And I wish you all the best.”
Luisa’s smile returned stronger. “Would you like to stay for dinner?”
Alicia hesitated, but only for a moment. “I’d love to.”