PART 2
I didn’t sleep all night.
Mariana collapsed beside me, as if nothing had happened, while I stared at the ceiling of the guest room at her mother’s house, trying to remember how many times I’d ignored things that were now beginning to look different.
Her “business” trips to Monterrey, Guadalajara, and Mérida. The calls she always answered in another room. The company where she’d supposedly worked for six years, a financial consulting firm whose actual office I’d never seen, nor any colleagues, nor a single inn, nor a photo, nor a single concrete story beyond “it was a tough day.”
I called it privacy. Maturity. Confidence.
But that morning, lying next to her, it began to look like something else.
Structure.
