Talking to that woman blew my mind. It wasn't until I got home that I realized what I had done: behave like a jerk and drag someone else down with me.

I looked him up, found out who he was. It wasn't hard with all the people I knew. They told me he had a sister, where he lived, what he did for a living. They never mentioned her, and I couldn't even remember her name. I didn't even listen to her. Zachary Stewart, 29 years old, single, electrical technician. He worked on large construction projects with contractors. No parents, one sister, 25 years old. I thought it was her, I don't know why. It never crossed my mind to wonder if he was married or had a partner. I was a son of a bitch.

She looked at me standing at the door, in her pajamas, as if I were a lunatic. And maybe at that moment I was crazy.

"Does Zachary Stewart live here?" I asked her as she rubbed her eyes, trying to wake herself up.

"Who are you?"

"Spencer Wildman. I'd like to talk to him."

"Zachary is at work," she said. "He'll be back later. What do you need him for?"

"I need to talk to him about a problem. Who are you?"

"Sabrina."

"Oh, his sister."

His sister? I can't believe how blind I was. How distraught I was that I didn't even realize it.

"What problem do you want to talk to him about?"

She should have slammed the door in my face. "Look..." I hesitated. "Can I come in? I don't want to talk about it in the hallway." And she let me in. A stranger who must have made a good impression because he was well dressed and because it looked like someone had died on me.

I looked at everything with my hands in my pockets.

I looked at her: tangled hair, sleepy face, all the confusion in the world in those green eyes. Pretty, simple, everything Vera wasn't.

Something made me stand still, just watching her. Little by little, she began to get nervous, shifting from one foot to the other, clutching the edge of her pajamas with her hands. Any moment now, she would call the police.

"So, what's going on with Zachary?" she asked me after closing the door.

"His brother sleeps with my wife," I blurted out, without thinking twice.

"Excuse me?"

"His brother is my wife's lover."

She froze. She was petrified.

"I don't understand," she shook her head.

"His brother sleeps with my wife."

How stupid, I repeated it again, slowly, as if she were dumb.

"Look, I think..."

"Vera. Her name is Vera," I cut her off.

"I don't know any Vera, I've never heard her name."

It was confusing, unreal, as if I were trying to say something and there was a lot of background noise distracting me.

"Tuesdays and Fridays are the days they see each other," I continued. "At the same hotel, at the same time."

"I think you've got the wrong person," she said. Yes, later I too wished I had got the wrong person. "You should..."

"Look," I interrupted her, showing her the phone. "It's him, isn't it?"

She took the phone and looked. And yes, it was him. Standing at a reception desk with a blonde woman, just as elegant, my wife. From the way her eyes widened in surprise, I knew I wasn't wrong.

Still, I was waiting for her to confirm it. I swiped the screen and showed her more photos. She stared for a long time at the one where Zachary was grabbing her butt.

"Yes, it's Zachary... How long has this been going on?"

"I don't know."

"And why did you come looking for him?"

"I don't know either. To see him up close, to talk to him. So his brother could explain to me what to do with 15 years of marriage."

She sat down on an armchair, collapsed onto it. She looked me in the face and started crying, just like that.

"He's not my brother," she said.

"What do you mean he's not your brother?"

"No," she cried louder. "He's my fiancé, my boyfriend. We've been together for three years."

"Shit."

I stood motionless. Her hands trembled as she wiped her face. Poor woman. She must have been the same age as him. You could tell how young she was, and I had knocked on her door to shatter her dreams. She had a simple ring on her finger, a silver wedding band perhaps, nothing expensive.

"I'd better go," I said, not knowing where to hide.

"Now you're going to leave after ruining my life?"

"Look, I didn't know..."

"I didn't know either!" she cried. "You come to my house to tell me that my boyfriend is sleeping with your wife as if it were nothing."

"Do you think it's easy for me?" I raised my voice. "Today is our fifteenth wedding anniversary, and that bitch is going to be waiting for me in lace lingerie, like she does every year."

How pathetic, complaining about infidelity like a little girl who had her doll taken away. It was that shit pressing on my chest, that voice in my head screaming that I was an idiot.

"If you're going to smash his face in, he'll be here in about an hour," he said, standing up with red cheeks.

"I'm not going to break his face."

"Then what? Did you come here to meet him, to sit down and talk about how you both sleep with the same woman?" he asked me with all the anger in the world. Since I was already there and had come up with the "news," I might as well eat the shit too.

"I told you I don't know..."

"What don't you know? Didn't you see the photos? Didn't you just tell me the days they see each other and where?"

I felt worse, because she was right. Because the logical thing would have been to beat him up, and yet I didn't even want to do that.

"I can't afford to beat up some piece of trash and end up in jail because my wife turned out to be a whore," I said, my voice thick with rage.

That face turned my stomach. I reached out and gave her my handkerchief. We were two stupid people, two people who had been cheated on, looking at each other's faces. I had lost control over something I didn't even know if I still cared about.

Me in a suit, her in her pajamas, and in two minutes we lost everything.

I had arrived late, around 5 in the morning. We played at the Jazz Band Club that night. There weren't many people there, but at least they paid us. Matías wasn't home. He got up at 6 and left for work.

Tuesdays and Fridays.

That Friday, he came home from being with her and caught me in the shower before I left. Out of guilt, I'm sure. Against the wall, penetrating me from behind, pulling my wet hair and biting my neck.

It was strange for him to do it like that. Usually, he would just lie down on the bed and wait for me to get on top of him. Now I counted the few times in those months that he took me the way I really liked, the times he came back from being with her.

He made me moan, gasp, scream.

He fucked me as if we hadn't touched each other in weeks, made me come twice, left his fingers marked on my waist. He squeezed my breasts, pinched my nipples, and came with his face buried in my back.

Did he fuck that guy's wife like that too? I cried harder. Humiliated, feeling dirty. Son of a bitch.

And that guy was firing off words, photographs. He wasn't angry, anyone in his place would have come in kicking down doors. He was overwhelmed, tired, I don't know. His eyes were burning, but he was holding back. Tall, black hair, well dressed. One of those guys you look at from afar because you know they'll never give you the time of day.

He was taken aback when I yelled at him, but he was still polite. A silk handkerchief. The rage I felt mixed with the scent of that piece of cloth, filling my lungs.

"I don't understand why you came, honestly," I said, handing him back the handkerchief.

"Because I lost what little sanity I had left. I don't make scenes like that," he stretched out his arm, "I don't get carried away. But I didn't think."

"It's obvious you didn't think," I spat.

"Would you have preferred not to know?" he asked me sarcastically.

I didn't know how to respond. Part of me hated that he had told me. The other part knew he was right. Better to know. Better than continuing to be an idiot.

"I don't know," I said. "But it's done now."

Standing there, I didn't know what else he wanted me to say. To thank him or to tell him to fuck off. I just wanted him to leave.

"I'm leaving," he said.

"Yes, go."

When I closed the door, I leaned against it. Everything that had happened in the shower now made sense. The urgency, the guilt, the way he took me as if it were the last time.

Because maybe it was.

I started packing everything I had into a bag. I couldn't stop crying. Andrea had told me a thousand times: "That guy doesn't love you, Sabrina, wake up."

But you don't wake up to anything when you feel secure, calm, not jumping from one boarding house to another, running away from two parents who had you because air was free. No, the feeling of security blinds you, convinces you that it's better not to know.

As soon as I told her, when Marcos left, Andrea yelled at me to leave right away, to kick him out, pack my things, and go to her house. The truth is, I had nowhere else to go. But she was newly married, pregnant, and was I going to move into her house?

"If you don't come, I'll come and drag you out by your hair." Get out of there, Sabrina. We'll get settled in here, she told me.

And that's what I was doing, gathering my things, when he came home from work. He saw me furiously stuffing things into my bag and got scared.

"What's going on?" he asked, approaching the bed.

"A guy came by today. A guy named Spencer Wildman."

"And?"

"He's the husband of the woman you're sleeping with, Zachary."

I was hoping to hear anything but what he said. That it was a mistake, a momentary lapse of judgment, that he hadn't thought it through. I don't know, something that would make me feel less like a piece of shit. A hint, a word that wasn't his usual selfish excuses. But no.

"I fell in love with her, Sabrina," he said as if it were no big deal. I didn't exist in his life; I hadn't been there for three years of putting up with his "depressions."

And I exploded.

"Then why the hell did you ask me to marry you if you're in love with another woman, you piece of trash?" I yelled at him.

Tears of rage were streaming down my face.

"I don't know, I really don't know. Wasn't that what you wanted?"

I threw the frame with the photo we had taken on our last vacation at his head. He hadn't asked me to marry him because he loved me, because he wanted to start a family with me, but because it was the logical thing to do, the next step. To keep me happy, so I wouldn't bother him.

"You came over to fuck her and then you fucked me. What was going on? Didn't you get all you wanted?

He stayed silent, didn't say anything to me. And I felt it more like rejection, like he was taking care of that woman by keeping her for himself.

"Sabrina, you know it wasn't working between us. We've been more like roommates than a couple for a long time," he finally said.

"No."

"What do you mean, no?"

"I didn't know anything. And we weren't roommates at all. We weren't roommates when it came to getting laid, were we?"

"Come on, don't be like that..."

"Fuck you, Zachary. How do you expect me to swallow all this? Tell me. You cheated on me. Period."

"I didn't want to hurt you, really," he said in that condescending tone.

"You didn't? According to you, if I didn't find out, you weren't hurting me. How the hell does your head work?"

"Look, this is what happened to me, this is how I feel... It's better if you know, so I don't have to lie anymore."

My blood boiled. It was the only thing he wanted: not to have to pretend he was a good guy, that he was a good boyfriend, that he had his life together.

"Better for whom?" I asked him. "For you, now that you don't have to make the effort to pretend you love me?"

"It's not that..."

"No? Then explain to me what it is. Because you just said you're relieved you don't have to lie anymore."

"Sabrina, please. You're exaggerating everything. I always loved you."

"You loved me while you were screwing someone else?"

"What I feel for her is different. It's more... mature. You and I were very young when we started, we were something else."

"Is that your excuse?"

"It's not an excuse."

"Oh, really? Then what is it? Because I didn't cheat on you," I continued. "I didn't screw up three years of your life. I didn't ask you to marry me while I was seeing someone else."

He ran his hand through his hair and sighed in frustration. He got like that when I cornered him, when I didn't let him manipulate me like he did with everyone else.

"What are you going to do now?" he asked me.

"Do what? With you? You can die," I spat at him, taking off my ring and throwing it on the floor.

"No, Sabrina. Where are you going to go?"

"Are you kicking me out?" He was crazy. He wasn't a piece of trash, he was a madman.

"No, I'm not kicking you out," he used that low voice to try to make me understand something that my stupidity wouldn't let me. "But if we're breaking up, we can't continue living together."

Of course, the apartment was his. I was the damn tenant who cleaned, cooked, did the laundry. Who was there at his disposal to spread my legs when he got hard. Who held his head while he threw up all the alcohol he drank because he felt that life wasn't going in the direction he dreamed of.

"You're right, I'm leaving."

"But where to?"

"As if you give a damn."

"I'm not a bastard. You have no one in the city, nowhere to go. What are you going to do? Go back to your parents?"

He was waiting for me to beg him on my knees to let me stay. He had that: he belittled you, reminded you that you were nothing. That way of twisting things to get what he wanted, to make you say what he needed to hear.

"I'm leaving anyway, don't worry. That way you'll save on the hotel room. But at least paint the bathroom, don't bring her to this hole without fixing it up first. The lady will be scared," I said mockingly.

I'm sure she was the one paying, because Zachary couldn't afford a 5-star hotel.

I tied my hair back, slung my bag over one shoulder and the bass over the other.

Dismantling three years of your life hurts. But it hurts more when the person you shared them with sees you as if you were a mistake.

"Should I call you a taxi?" he said, standing up.

"Go to hell, Zachary."

I slammed the door and ran downstairs because I was about to start crying again. When I got downstairs, I was out of breath, suffocating. The neighbor on the ground floor was taking out the trash and looked at me scared, but she didn't ask me anything. She quickly went inside and closed the door.

That's what I got for being stubborn, for insisting on something that always smelled rotten. For being comfortable, for wanting to stop fighting every day with life.

Now I had to start all over again.

That night Vera waited for me as if nothing had happened, as if she hadn't slept with another guy. Fifteen years, I don't know what kind of anniversary. Beautiful, gorgeous, with silky hair, painted lips, in black lingerie. I got hard despite everything. I hated her for that. For still being beautiful. For still turning me on. For being there as if none of that shit had happened.

"Happy anniversary," she said in a sultry voice. "Do you like it?"

My soul and my member were exploding.

"Is this how you dress for him too?" I asked her.

Her face changed in an instant, incredible.

"How did you know?"

That made me even angrier, she didn't even bother to deny it, to cry, to lie to me. She admitted it just like that.

"Lucas saw you going into the hotel."

"Oh, and that bothers you?" She came closer and unzipped my pants. "Imagining me with someone else?"

She reached in and caressed me. I got even harder. Vera looked at me with shining eyes, savoring, playing, testing. I didn't know she was so cold-blooded, or that she thought I was an idiot.

I pulled her hand away and zipped up my pants.

"I'm not going to fuck you anymore," I said. She didn't believe me, wrapped her arms around my neck, and kissed me.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. I made love to my wife, I didn't fuck a whore," I spat. Slut.

At that moment, I didn't know what disgusted me more: knowing that she spread her legs for another man or that she thought masturbating like that would solve things.

"What do you want me to say if you already know?"

"Tell me how you met him, as an anniversary gift."

And she told me. The guy had gone to her dental clinic. Of course. She had been seeing him for six months. Five of those months they had been meeting in the same place. I asked her if she knew he had a girlfriend, and she said yes. But she didn't know he was engaged.

That hurt her. She bit her lip when she didn't like something, when something didn't add up or made her angry.

"Engaged? How do you know?"

"Because I went looking for him and I found her. She told me."

"Why did you go looking for him? To beat him up?"

"No. I wanted to see the face of the man who's fucking my wife. Maybe he knew what the hell I had to do."

We didn't even have that left, not even the desire to fight, to scream, to yell at each other. Easy and simple, like a formality. Nothing remained of what we once were together. And I never realized it.

"Did you fall in love?" I asked him.

"What? I'm too old for that, Spencer."

"What is it then? A younger dick? Does he fuck you harder?"

She looked at me before answering.

"It's attention. It's three hours where I'm the center of the universe and not some fucking senator or congressman."

"So you fuck him because I don't pay attention to you. I don't take you wherever the hell you want to go, I don't buy you all the shit you can think of, I'm not there when your fucking mother drives you crazy."

They say women cheat when they don't feel loved, when they're not listened to, when they're pushed into the background. While we do it just to get laid wherever we can. Maybe I didn't know how to show her that she was my whole world, that all those hours of work, meetings, and last-minute rushes were to give her what she needed.

I had a thousand opportunities to fuck one of those interns who came and went, a thousand more to get a blowjob under the desk from some bored wife of one of those fourth-rate politicians. The new secretary who kept bending over the desk, almost putting her ass in my face. But no, the only one I ever wanted was her.

Apparently, it wasn't enough.

"What do we do now?" I asked her because I didn't know what to do, or didn't want to. And it seemed like she had a clearer idea, that she didn't care as much.

"I'm leaving tomorrow," she said, and that was that.

I didn't beg her or ask her to think it over. My marriage disappeared just like that. Like a whisper.

I slept in the guest house, another stupid whim of hers that I indulged. No one came to the house, we had plenty of rooms, but she wanted to do it anyway.

And maybe the guy was running the cables and putting in the plugs. Maybe he fucked her there too, among the bricks and bags of cement.

For building that house, I got a blowjob in the kitchen after dinner. She sucked me like an expert, salivating, licking, swallowing it all. How did she do it? How the hell did she manage to keep sleeping with me when she was already with the other guy? And I came in her throat, squeezing her head a little so she would swallow it all, because she had a habit of spitting. It disgusted her, she said. I opened a bottle of wine and sat down to drink it straight from it. I remembered her, my wife's lover's girlfriend. Well, she wasn't my wife anymore. How she cried and her voice trembled. And I felt like the biggest son of a bitch in the world again.

I figured she was also wondering how he could have the nerve to ask her to marry him while he was fucking someone else. Maybe she'd be luckier than me, if he told her it was just fucking with nothing else involved.

The bottle ended up empty on the floor and I passed out in my suit on the couch. When I woke up, it was around ten in the morning and Vera was gone.

The part of the closet with her clothes was empty, as was the dressing room. The drawers, the jewelry, even the bathroom products had disappeared. The car wasn't in the garage.

She just left as if she had never lived with me.

And I carried on as usual. As if nothing had happened. So much so that a week later there was a fundraising dinner. So I got my suit ready, prepared the lies I would tell when they asked me about her, shaved, looked in the mirror, and left. What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to react? Beat my chest for being a cuckold, kick the house apart, get drunk for a week straight and cry?

The most bizarre thing about the whole situation: my wife had cheated on me, she had left without even saying goodbye, and I was driving to a fundraiser dinner full of hypocrites, thinking about that guy's girlfriend.