You lean back in your chair. “Do what?”
“Make everything uglier.”
“There’s that word again.”
She inhales shakily. “He loves me.”
“That was not the question.”
Silence.
Then she says, “You’re just trying to hurt him.”
“No,” you reply. “I’m trying to make sure nobody built a throne out of my marriage for a child whose paternity even the father can’t carry confidently.”
The line goes dead.
After that, the unraveling begins.
Not in one huge public collapse. In little cracks. Rosa stops calling. Diego goes from arrogant to erratic in his messages to Adriana’s office. He first rejects the idea of testing as insulting, then offers to “deal with that later,” then finally agrees in principle while complaining that you are turning a private matter into humiliation.
Adriana forwards you his lawyer’s emails with the driest notes imaginable.
He is nervous.
He is cornered.
He is lying or about to discover someone else did.
You do not know which would satisfy you more.
Meanwhile, your own life begins doing the rude but necessary thing life always does after catastrophe. It keeps moving.
You still wake early. You still dress for work at the bank. You still ride through morning traffic into central Guadalajara, where no one knows yet that your marriage has become a carcass picked over by lawyers and extended family. At your desk, customers slide checks toward you, ask questions about transfers and loan rates, smile, complain, flirt, grumble, thank you. Ordinary transactions. It feels almost offensive and then, slowly, like mercy.
Your friend Mariela becomes your unofficial keeper of sanity.
She brings empanadas on Tuesdays, texts you disgusting memes about useless men, and reminds you to eat when anger threatens to become its own diet. One evening, after helping you switch streaming passwords and remove Diego from a half-dozen shared subscriptions, she says the thing no one else had yet dared.
“You know this didn’t begin with the mistress, right?”
