The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba - Chanel Cleeton Page 0,126

you challenge me, and you accept me as I am without trying to change me.” I hesitate. “But I don’t know that I’m cut out for marriage and the rest of it. I fear I might always wish to be dashing off somewhere chasing the next story. It’s hard work and long hours. I’d likely make a terrible wife. I have no interest in hosting parties and dinners and the like. I don’t even know if I want children. And I have a terrible tendency toward messiness when I’m busy with work.”

“I’m not sure what sort of husband I’d make. I don’t exactly have a lot of experience in the matter. I can be irritable and demanding, and I work too hard and too frequently. I take risks because I like them. But I know that I love you. Maybe we could figure it out together. Maybe it doesn’t have to look like what anyone else has. Maybe it could just be something all our own.”

“Is that a proposal?” I ask, torn between equal parts fear and hope.

He nods. “Grace Harrington, will you marry me?”

It feels a bit like leaping into the air, or walking across scaffolding without a safety net beneath you. But if my career in journalism has taught me anything, it’s that sometimes you have to face your fears and learn as you go.

“Yes. I’ll marry you.”

He grins, gathering me up in his arms, as we experience our first kiss as an engaged couple.

When we are finished, we walk down Park Row, side by side as we head home, the sounds of the newsboys hawking their papers filling my ears:

“Get the Journal. One cent. The Journal acts when others fail to.”

Forty-Eight

Marina

I stand outside the entrance of the Perez mansion in Havana, waiting for the door to open.

After five months in Recogidas, I am free.

When I told the reporter from the New York Journal my story and she said she would do everything in her power to see me liberated from the prison, I didn’t believe it possible. But in the end, I found an unlikely rescuer in Evangelina Cisneros and her new husband, our old family friend Carlos Carbonell. He saw to it that the Americans he sided with from the beginning secured my release from the prison in return for all of the work I did as a courier.

The door to my parents’ house opens, and Carmela stares back at me over the threshold.

“Marina! We’ve been so worried about you. Wh—”

My legs give out, and the rest of her words are cut off as she gathers me in her embrace. She holds me while I cry and strokes my hair as she did when I was a little girl.

When it feels as though all of the tears have been wrung from my body, my strength returning, I wipe my face and say—

“I am here for my daughter.”

Carmela leads me through the house, to the family sitting room where she brought me last time.

“Can I offer you something to drink? Something to eat?” Tears fill her eyes. “You look—”

I shake my head and speak past the lump forming in my throat. “Just my daughter, please.”

“Let me get Isabella for you,” she says, leaving me alone.

I sink down on the settee, my heart pounding, nerves filling me at the idea of seeing my daughter again. What will Isabella think when she sees me again? Will she want to leave all of this? I have nothing to offer her, have no idea what sort of life we’ll lead going forward.

I have to hope that my love for her is enough.

At the sound of footsteps, I look up, but where I expected to see my daughter and Carmela, I am greeted by my mother instead; a small bag in her hands.

She stops mid-stride, her gaze fixed on me.

“Marina.”

I am once again both the woman who left and the girl who once loved her so much, who looked up to her for some sense of security in the world, and for a moment, I want nothing more than to sink into her arms, but I stay where I am, the weight of all that has happened dragging me down. I am home, and yet, I am not.

“Thank you. Thank you for taking care of Isabella when I couldn’t. Thank you for—”

She shakes her head. “No. Do not thank me. It was the least I could do. The least I could do when I could not care for my daughter.” Her voice