The Thirty Pact

At a quarter to midnight on the twenty-seventh of February, Abril climbed the last flight of stairs to the roof of the building where she had grown up. She was carrying a slice of her own birthday cake. Downstairs, in her mother's apartment, her aunts were still debating why she hadn't found a husband yet. She wanted ten minutes of quiet before her thirtieth birthday was over.

But someone was already up there, leaning against the old water tank. He turned around, and the cake almost slid off her plate. "Matías? What are you doing here? I thought you were in Montreal." "I was, until this morning," he said. "I'd have been here hours ago if my connection in Houston hadn't been delayed. I knew you'd end up on the roof. You always did when your family got too loud."

"But why are you here?" Instead of answering, he shone his phone's flashlight on the side of the tank. Beneath fifteen years of rust, the words were still there, written in black marker in his clumsy teenage handwriting: IF WE'RE BOTH STILL SINGLE AT 30, WE GET MARRIED. A + M, 27/02.

Abril burst out laughing. "You're joking. You flew all the way from Canada because of something we wrote on my fifteenth birthday?" "A deal's a deal," he said. "Unless you're seeing someone, of course. Had you been married, I'd have wished you a happy birthday and gone quietly home." "I'm not seeing anyone," she admitted, "as my aunts have pointed out about forty times tonight."

She waited for him to laugh as well, but he didn't. "Do you remember whose idea it was?" he asked. "Yours, I think. You'd just been dumped by some girl from school. What was her name?" "There wasn't one. I made her up." He kept his eyes on the writing. "I was fifteen, I was in love with you, and I didn't have the nerve to say so. So I said 'if' instead. If we're single, if we're thirty. It sounded like a joke, which meant you couldn't turn me down."

"Matías..." "I've felt the same way ever since," he went on, before she could interrupt. "I've had girlfriends, and I moved to another country, and none of it worked. Every year on this date I've thought, by the time she's thirty, she'll have met someone, and I'll have lost my chance without even trying. So I'm trying. The pact was never the reason. It was just the only way I knew how to ask."

For a long time, Abril said nothing. She thought of the boy who used to carry her mother's shopping up six flights of stairs, and who had cried harder than she had when her dog died. Then he had moved to Montreal at twenty-two and called less and less. She set the plate down. "If I'd known any of this back then...," she began, and stopped, because she honestly didn't know how that sentence ended.

"Give me a week," she said at last. "One week to think about this properly. Can you stay that long?" Matías smiled for the first time since she had arrived. "I've waited fifteen years," he said. "I think I can manage seven more days."