Ana Schuwaltz

Chapter 29: I Never Doubted It

How do you know why someone chose you?
You don’t. You just decide whether you’re going to spend years asking.

I’ve skipped ahead. Let me go back to the night I told my parents about Papi’s offer.

My father asked how long that man had been planning it.

I said I didn’t know.

He wasn’t the only one who wanted the answer.

I never really doubted whether I would accept. That part had been decided, as usual, long before I admitted it to myself.

It was the question underneath my father’s that kept me up.

Why would he offer me so much?

My mother had an answer. She said there wasn’t anyone quite like me.

Mothers say that. It isn’t evidence.

But I kept going back to it, because I didn’t have anything better.

I’m not the smartest person in a room. I’ve never been the most educated one.

What I have is a way of talking to people that isn’t a technique. Sometimes it connects, and you can feel it when it does.

That isn’t modesty or arrogance. It’s just the one thing I’ve always been able to do.

Most of my close friends at school were boys. Years of conversations that went anywhere and didn’t have to be important.

Nobody needed to win. You could laugh at yourself.

I think that’s where I learned it.

And then I started thinking about the day we met.

At the time I hadn’t thought much of it. We talked. I was myself. Nothing else happened.

But the more I replayed it, the more I thought something had already been decided by the end of that conversation.

Not when the offer came. Before that.

Which changes the question.

It wasn’t what he saw in me. It was what I did in that conversation that let him see it.

And I still don’t know what it was. I’ve been trying to do it on purpose ever since.

I’d like to say I was trying to understand him.

I was trying to confirm that my mother was right.

A week later he wrote to ask whether I had a car.

I said yes.

It was the first thing he had ever asked me for.

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