For one fleeting, suffocating second, a ghost of the man I used to be considered getting dressed. I thought about racing to the airport, chartering a flight, doing the right thing.
But then I looked around. The ocean view. The sleeping, beautiful woman who never asked me for anything but money and charm. The absolute, unbothered silence of my escape.
I chose myself.
“I can’t leave,” I lied, staring blankly at the wall. “There’s a massive storm off the coast. All flights are grounded. Sign the papers for me, please.”
The silence on the other end of the line was worse than any screaming match. It was the sound of a bridge burning.
Then Mauricio spoke, his voice trembling with a rage I had never heard before. “Your wife could die tonight, Marcial.”
I closed my eyes, squeezing out the inconvenience of reality. “Do whatever is necessary. I’ll pay for everything.”
I hung up.
Just like that. That easily. That shamefully.
Valeria opened her eyes, stretching like a cat in the moonlight. She smiled, looking completely innocent to the fact that she was sharing a bed with a man who had just abandoned his wife to the surgeon’s knife.
“Everything okay, baby?” she whispered.
I looked at her, my pulse steadying into a cold, dead rhythm. “Yeah. Nothing important.”
Nothing important. My wife was being cut open, fighting an infection that was currently poisoning her blood, and I called it nothing important. I powered off my primary phone and shoved it into the drawer, as if suffocating the screen could suffocate my guilt.
I drank the rest of the champagne. I pulled Valeria close. I convinced myself that the world would keep spinning perfectly on the axis I had built for it.
But it didn’t. Because while I was drowning in my own filth in Monterrey, under the harsh, unforgiving fluorescent lights of that hospital, Mauricio didn’t just sign a medical authorization. He signed something else.
Something that would systematically destroy the empire I thought I controlled.
Three days later, I finally returned.
On the first-class flight back, I practically rehearsed my facial expressions in the lavatory mirror. Concerned. Exhausted. A little guilty for missing the emergency, but not too guilty. Just enough to look like a man burdened by the heavy demands of running an empire. Just enough to maintain the illusion of the respectable Marcial Salgado.
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