Page 92 of Every Step She Takes
“Uh, yes. Sort of.”
“How is someonesort ofyour dad?” Ro demands.
“Valentim Costa?” Stefano echoes. “Wasn’t he quite handsome?”
“I don’t know,” I grumble. “I didn’t spend a lot of time considering my father’s attractiveness.”
“He was very handsome,” Vera clarifies.
Ari swivels back to me. “This man, your father… he’sfamous?”
My mouth can’t wrap itself around an answer. “Oh yeah,” Vera says. “The Costas are, like, the wealthiest family in Portugal.”
“The Silvas are the wealthiest family in Portugal, actually,” Luzia corrects, and I can feel everyone’s eyes on me. I can tell they’re looking at me differently. I’m no longer Mal to them; I’ll never be Mal again. I’m Maëlys Calista Gonçalves Costa.
My shirt is choking me, and it’s impossibly hot and stuffy in this formal dining room, and I feel like the decanter, like I’m breaking into a million pieces.
“Perhaps we could get everyone off to their rooms,” Inez suggests, and I can breathe a little better as everyone looks away, moves away.
Luzia and Inez pass out brass keys to the rest of the tour group, with directions on how to find their rooms on the third floor. One of the keys goes to Sadie, and then Luzia turns to me. “I’ll have Felipe set up your old room,” she says. She hugs me one more time. “Welcome home, menina.”
Nothing about this place feels like home.
“How could you do this to me?”
My shouts echo off the high ceilings and too-big room, the way my father’s shouts always used to. Even that comparison doesn’t quell my anger.
“Funnily enough, this isn’t actually about you,” Inez shouts back. “This was the plan before you signed up to join the tour at the last minute. I just didn’t know how to tell you!”
“Why was this part of the tour at all? Why do your tours involve staying here?”
She clasps her hands together beneath her chin. “Luzia reached out to me a few years back, asking about a partnership with Beatrix to bring more American tourists through Quinta Costa. They were in the midst of a distribution deal in North America, and—”
“And you sold out? You agreed to work with the man who rejected me for being gay?”
She shakes her head. “No, I agreed to work with a company that wanted to support a trans-owned business.”
“Well, congratulations,” I spit. “I’m sure he was only using you as a pawn to make the company appear more progressive. You were just someone he could parade around during Pride month.”
All the radiant light in Inez’s face dies out, and the guilt feels like a corkscrew to my heart. “That was a shitty thing to say,” she tells me in a flat voice.
And I know it was. “Fuck. I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
“It’s okay. You’re grieving. I know you didn’t mean that.” Inez exhales and carefully lowers herself down onto one of my father’s many couches, which are meant for looking, not actual sitting. A couch could never just be a couch; it had to be a statement piece, a conversation starter at dinner parties, a minefield for a perpetually messy little girl.
My lip quivers with impending tears, and I bite down. “I wish you’d told me about this.”
“If I had,” Inez says quietly, “you wouldn’t have come.”
“Yes, exactly.”
She stares up at me from her awkward perch. “You needed to come here, Mal.”
I did. But that wasn’t Inez’s call to make.
My old room has been preserved like a terrifying monument to my preteen self. In every one of my father’s houses, I was given a space that was solely mine, and it was often the only room that didn’t look like the display floor at a Sotheby’s. Valentim always gave me full creative freedom with the design and décor of my bedroom, so each one was like a time capsule revealing who I was when he bought the house.
He acquired this house and this vineyard in 1999, which means I’m staring at a reminder of my wannabe emo-punk-rocker phase, with dark purple walls and black curtains contrasting the four different caboodles full of Wet N Wild makeup. It’s a toss-up between what’s worse: the giant poster of Limp Bizkit’s albumSignificant Other, or the fact that it hangs over the dresser where I lined up all my Beanie Babies.
