New Boss

"Oh, girl, good luck in there. The man is very handsome, I'll give him that, but he's unfriendly and grumpy. He kept me in the same position, but he laid down some rules I have to follow or I'll be fired. So please, the second he calls you, run to his office so he doesn't have an excuse to let you go," said Catalina, Emilia's best friend.

Catalina hadn't even finished speaking when Emilia's phone rang, indicating it was her turn to go in, introduce herself to the boss, and find out whether she still had a job.

"Hello, sir. Good afternoon," Emilia said nervously, looking at her boss and wondering if he had recognized her. Because yes, the moment Emilia walked in, she recognized that cologne and that voice.* But he didn't recognize her. And right then and there, she confirmed what she had always known: she had never mattered to him. Ha -- stupid. Obviously you were never important to him. You were a damn bet,* her mind told her. Of course her heart ached, because as foolish as it was, her daughters would always remind her of him. And in this case, Abraham was her first love, her first man -- even though the infatuation had only been on her side. She had been happy in that lie, in that ignorance, before the world came crashing down when she learned the horrible truth. Of course she hated Abraham, deeply, but the idiot had given her two blessings. Was it hard raising them alone? Of course it was. She was barely seventeen when she got pregnant. She was barely about to turn eighteen when she became a mother. She had to finish school at night because she worked afternoons to support her daughters. She managed to get a degree through sheer effort, and thanks to her parents' help, she was able to keep going.

"Have a seat," Abraham said without even looking up at her.

"Name?" he asked in a tone so cold it froze Emilia to the bone.

"Emilia Bustamante."

"Age, Emilia."

"I'm twenty-eight, sir."

"I'm reviewing your file with the company, and it says here you're a single mother of two nine-year-old daughters. I have to wonder if you meet the requirements to work at my company, because I need people who give one hundred percent -- not ninety-nine. And from what I can see, you have two very large distractions. I'm sorry, but you don't meet the requirements to continue working for me."

Emilia's heart stopped. She was her family's sole provider. Her parents were sick -- a poorly managed diabetes had led to devastating health consequences. She had two daughters. There was no way she'd find another job that quickly, much less one that paid what she earned here. On top of that, her daughters' tenth birthday was coming up.

"Sir, one question -- are you firing me because I have two daughters?" she asked, her voice shaking. She couldn't believe that this man was ruining her life for the second time.

"Not at all, miss. I'm simply letting you go because I feel you don't have the profile my company requires. So please return to your workstation, and at the end of your shift, come back to sign your severance paperwork. I'll be expecting you at six o'clock sharp," he said without lifting his eyes from his computer. Not once did he look at Emilia.

Emilia stood up like a zombie, but when she reached the door, someone burst in -- Abraham's best friend, the one who had also been part of that bet. He stared at Emilia, her face striking him as familiar. He saw the woman's eyes glistening with tears. Emilia excused herself and hurried out.

"You son of a bitch -- what did you do to that poor woman? She left here practically in tears."

"I fired her. She doesn't meet the requirements I need for this company. Besides, she has two kids. She's a single mother, and that takes up time. I need competent people working for me, not a single mom who'll be asking for time off every time her daughters need her."

"You heartless bastard. If she's a single mother, that's even more reason she needs the job. Why did you fire her? And I want the truth."

"That is the truth. She just rubbed me the wrong way. I don't know why, but I don't like her. And since it's my company, I don't want her working for me. That's all."

Mateo sat down on one of the couches. (Mateo was Abraham's friend -- the one who had been part of that bet.) He kept thinking, trying to place where he had seen that face, but he couldn't remember.

"Abraham, what's the name of the woman who just left your office in tears?" Mateo asked, curious.

"Emilia Bustamante. Why?"

"Emilia -- Emilia Bustamante?" he said, nearly shouting.

"Why the hell are you yelling, Mateo?"

"Dude. Emilia Bustamante -- isn't she the girl from the bet we made right before we graduated?"

"What girl? What bet?" Abraham asked.

"Man, remember the bet where you had to seduce the most studious girl in school and get her into bed? Remember?" Mateo asked cautiously.

Abraham felt a chill run through his entire body. He immediately began pulling up Emilia Bustamante's personnel file.

Emilia Bustamante attended school from pre-K through senior year at their school, but for some reason didn't finish senior year there -- she completed it at an adult education school years later.

She became a mother at eighteen. Two girls, currently nine years old and about to turn ten.

"Abraham -- that time you slept with her, did you use protection?" Mateo asked.

"I barely even remembered I slept with her. How do you expect me to remember if I used protection? I was a stupid kid who did everything for fun. That classmate never meant anything to me. Damn it -- could I have gotten her pregnant?"

"Doing the math, you're quite possibly a father."

Mateo stood up alongside Abraham to go talk to Emilia immediately, but they only caught a glimpse of her heading into the bathroom with her friend. They stopped by the door and listened as she cried and said the following words to her friend:

"What am I going to do? What am I going to do without a job? I'm my daughters' sole provider. You know everything it's taken to raise them. You've been with me through the worst moments. You've helped me so much. You know everything I've been through, from having the girls to how hard it was to finish my education."

"Girl, why don't you find your daughters' father and tell him they exist so he can help you?"

Emilia let out a bitter laugh and replied: "That man doesn't even know I exist. How do you expect him to know about the girls? To him, I was always a game. To him, I was a bet -- a damn bet. While to me, he was my entire world."

"Will you ever tell me who the father is?" her best friend asked.

"I'd rather not. I'd rather nobody knows who the girls' father is. I don't want them to go looking for him someday only to have him reject them, because I am one hundred percent sure he would reject them just for being my daughters, for carrying my blood."

"Are you sure about that?" Emilia's friend asked.

"Absolutely."

"I'll have to keep working until the end of my shift, and first thing tomorrow I'll start job hunting, because my daughters eat every day -- I can't afford the luxury of being unemployed."

"But girl, I don't understand why he fired you. You've always given this company everything you've got."

"According to the boss, I don't meet the company's requirements because I'm a single mother. He says my daughters are distractions that won't let me give my full hundred percent."

Emilia and Catalina were leaving the bathroom when Abraham and Mateo noticed and rushed back to the office.

Abraham didn't know what to think. He had fired the mother of his children. He had been a complete bastard in the past, and he had been a complete bastard again just now. That poor woman had raised their daughters all on her own.

"What are you going to do?" Mateo asked.

"I don't know. Honestly, this has all caught me completely off guard. I didn't even recognize her when I saw her. And now I find out I have two daughters with her. Funny how things work out -- my whole life I've been careful not to become a father, and it turns out I'm the father of children from a woman I didn't even remember." Abraham's chest ached as he thought about everything Emilia must have endured from her pregnancy until now.

"Are you still going to fire her, now that you know who she is?" Mateo asked again.

"No. No, I'm not going to fire her. She's the sole provider for the daughters I rejected before they were even born. Mateo, I'm sure that the time she came looking for me and I humiliated her, she was there to tell me about the pregnancy. I'm one hundred percent sure of it."

"That's right -- after that, we never saw her again. And we never bothered to ask about her either."

"And you're only just remembering this now?" Mateo asked.

"Yes. And I remember everything perfectly."

Mateo just looked at him without saying a word.

"Mateo, I need your help getting close to her and the girls. I need to know everything -- and I mean everything -- about them. I want it all by today. I need to know what school they go to, their birthday, what they like, what scares them, what makes them angry, their hobbies, their favorite food, their favorite color, whether they get bullied at school -- everything. I need to know down to what time they eat."

"Sure thing, man. Give me three hours and I'll bring you everything."

With that, Mateo left the office, leaving Abraham behind with his heart pounding a thousand beats per minute.

"Please tell Miss Emilia to come to my office immediately," he said before hanging up the phone.

To be continued...

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