You stare at him for one long beat and think about all the nights you rushed home from the bank in traffic thick with exhaust and rain just to cook dinner while he scrolled through his phone and told you he was stressed. You think about the times he forgot anniversaries but remembered his gym schedule, the months his touch grew colder, the way you blamed yourself for every invisible shift in him because women are trained to diagnose their own defects before suspecting betrayal in men. You think about how calmly he said another woman was pregnant, as if he were discussing a new business opportunity instead of detonating the center of your life.
And now he wants fairness.
“I think,” you say quietly, “you lost the right to use that word the day you got another woman pregnant and then brought her into my living room.”
The mistress finally speaks again, voice low and trembling in a way that might have fooled you if you had not already seen the gleam in her eyes when Rosa first spoke of rights.
“I didn’t come here to disrespect you.”
You look at her.
Then you look at the framed photo on the wall behind the sofa, the one from your wedding day. You in ivory lace, smiling like a woman still standing inside a promise. Diego beside you, handsome and proud and apparently rehearsing his future crimes behind dimples. Your mother on the far side, glowing with exhausted joy because she had just handed you the deed to this house that morning, whispering that no matter what happened in life, you would always have one roof in this world nobody could take from you.
You look back at the mistress.
“You walked into another woman’s home carrying her husband’s baby and asked for the position she built beside him. Don’t insult us both by calling that respect.”
Color creeps up her neck.
Lucía jumps in quickly, eager as always to help ugliness dress itself up as reason.
“Come on, Camila, she means she didn’t come here trying to humiliate you. We’re all just trying to solve this like adults.”
