Upstairs, I can hear my mother moving heavily in her room on the second floor. On the third floor, Esteban is still asleep. My younger brother, Tomás, who is Lucía’s husband, left hours before sunrise for his grueling shift at the automotive parts warehouse. The house is waking up in fragmented, domestic routines, and suddenly I harbor a deep, violent resentment for the timing of ordinary life.
“Tonight,” Lucía whispers, her voice barely carrying over the bubbling oatmeal. “On the roof. After everyone is asleep.”
I know I should insist on right now. I should demand the truth in the harsh light of day. But something in Lucía’s face paralyzes my tongue. It is terror, stretched so thin and taut that it desperately resembles courtesy.
I give her a single, tight nod. “Tonight.”
All day, the house feels like a poorly constructed stage play. My mother complains about her arthritis. Esteban appears exactly ten minutes later, casually scratching his bare chest, pressing a lazy kiss to my cheek, and complaining loudly that he slept poorly. A lie. I know he slept like a rock; I listened to his rhythmic breathing for hours.
But when Esteban turns and sees Lucía standing at the stove, his expression shifts so rapidly I almost miss it.
It isn’t desire. It isn’t irritation. It is something far stranger, far colder.
Recognition.
It lasts less than a second before he smiles warmly. “Morning,” he says cheerfully. Lucía refuses to meet his eyes.
I feel the brief exchange like a phantom breath of ice across the back of my neck. Until this exact moment, I had treated Lucía’s nightly intrusion as a mere problem orbiting around shame and social propriety. A severe boundary issue.
But now, a canyon of a possibility opens up beneath my feet. What if Lucía has not been sleeping between me and Esteban because she fears the dark, drafty hallways of an unfamiliar city house?
What if the monster she is hiding from isn’t in her head? What if he is lying right beside me?
The thought is so incredibly ugly, so violently disruptive, that my mind attempts to reject it at once.
Not Esteban.
Not my husband, who patiently rubs foul-smelling ointment into my mother’s shoulder. Not the meticulous man who folds plastic grocery bags into perfect triangles under the kitchen sink. Esteban is not a cruel man. He is absolutely not one of those leering, dangerous men whose darkness clings to them like cheap cologne.
