It wasn’t what she’d said that surprised me. It was the concern in Julia’s voice. Remorse cut through me when I thought of how demanding I’d been when she worked for me. On her first day I’d seen how competent she was, how eager to please. I’d expected nothing short of perfection and she’d never let me down. Not once had I considered I was just wearing her out.

“I don’t know why you look like I just kicked your dog,” Julia said, staring at me from behind her sunglasses. “You didn’t make Alba turn into a workaholic—that’s been twenty-nine years in the making.” I made a noncommittal sound, not fully convinced that I didn’t have a hand in it. Not all of it was me. But some of it had to be.

“She told me about when her family first got here,” I said, surprising myself.

“She did?” Julia asked, surprised. “They moved in right across the street from us. They first landed in the Bronx,” she said after a long pause. “But one of Alba’s aunts knew the man who owned the house across from ours in Queens and they took the apartment on the second floor.” Alba’s friend threw her head back, eyes closed like she was conjuring a memory. “She was a godsend. We were stuck at the hip from Day One. Insta besties.” Julia laughed, recalling their first meeting. “My grandmother doesn’t speak a word of English, and she watched me and my sister while my parents worked so my Spanish was pretty good, and poor Alba was hard up.”

“Has she really always been so...” Intense, stubborn, persistent. It’s not like I didn’t understand those things. Those three words had been my mantra at one point in my life. But what I saw in Alba was different than my pursuit of an Olympic medal. I’d had to grind, but in many ways the train had been put on the tracks for me; all I had to do was drive it to the finish line. Alba, she had to lay the tracks as she went. She was always grasping, constantly reaching for whatever she could grab on to. Like there wasn’t a single thing she could let pass her by. As if seizing every opportunity was a matter of life or death.

“Relentless?” Julia finally asked and I nodded. She gave me a lopsided smile and sighed deeply, as if her friend’s story weighed on her. “I mean it’s not like I don’t get it. We are all like that at least a little bit. The immigrant parents, the grind. You know how it is.” I did and I didn’t. Of course, my dad had lived through that, but by the time I was born, he was a millionaire.