My husband never touched me in three years of marriage. Then one stormy night, I heard a stranger’s voice coming from my mother-in-law’s room… And the truth behind that door made my blood run cold.

“You let me marry a stranger.”

Her answer comes without a tremor. “I let you marry into security.”

Elías mutters something under his breath, but I do not catch it because my pulse is thundering too loudly.

Security. That is what she calls it. A lie large enough to swallow a woman’s life whole, relabeled as stability. I think of the three years since the wedding. How carefully “Adrián” treated me. How he kissed my forehead but not my mouth for long. How he kept his hands clasped during movies. How he slept turned slightly away. It was not disinterest. Not exactly. It was distance born of theft. A man inhabiting another man’s place and terrified that real intimacy would betray him.

I look at Elías.

“So you married me. You moved into my life. You let me call you by his name. And then you wouldn’t touch me because why. Guilt.”

For the first time, something like pain crosses his face without disguise. “Because every time you looked at me, I thought if I touched you, it would become unforgivable.”

I laugh once, sharp and disbelieving. “Become.”

He accepts that blow.

Adrián speaks then, and his voice is worse somehow because it contains actual shame. “I told him it was temporary.”