When I strode into the private hospital room, the smell of iodine and floor wax hit the back of my throat. Irma was there. Pale. Frail. An IV line snaked into the back of her bruised hand. But she was alive.
I felt a wave of relief, quickly followed by something much uglier in the rotten basement of my chest: annoyance. Because now that she was alive, I had to keep performing. I had to keep lying.
I walked toward the bed, plastering on my carefully crafted look of distress. “Mi amor—”
She didn’t smile. She didn’t cry. She didn’t ask where I had been or how bad the storm was. She just looked at me. And that look was not love. It was an executioner’s stare.
“You’re late,” she said softly, her voice dry and rasping from the intubation tube.
I swallowed, stopping at the foot of the bed. “There were no flights, Irma. The weather—”
“Sit down, Marcial.”
The absolute calm in her voice terrified me more than shattered glass or screaming ever could have. I slowly sank into the vinyl guest chair.
With a trembling but deliberate hand, she reached to the bedside table and slid a thick manila envelope across the tray toward me.
“Open it.”
My fingers went numb. I peeled back the clasp and pulled out a stack of high-resolution photographs.
Me. Valeria. The luxury suite balcony. The yacht rental in Puerto Vallarta. The champagne bottles. Our hands intertwined at a five-star restaurant. Every betrayal, every stolen weekend, captured perfectly with timestamps printed neatly in the bottom right corners.
My throat closed. The oxygen evaporated from the room. “How did you—”
“Mexico is a much smaller country than you think, Marcial,” Irma said, her eyes boring into my skull. “And people talk. Especially when you pay for your mistresses with corporate cards that don’t belong exclusively to you.”
For the first time in twenty years, the great negotiator had absolutely nothing to say. I wasn’t just naked in front of her. It was worse. I was morally eviscerated.
“Irma, I can explain—” I started, falling back on the instinct to talk my way out of a deficit.
“No,” she interrupted, wincing slightly as she shifted against the pillows. “You already explained everything with your actions. While I was being wheeled into surgery, praying to God I would survive the night, you were drinking. While I was signing away my power of attorney in case I slipped into a coma, you were spending our money on another woman.”
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