“I just married Fernanda, my office colleague. You continue with your sad life, Mariana.”
That message reached me at 2:47 in the morning, while I was asleep on the couch at my house in Querétaro, with the television on without volume and a blanket up to my waist.
Raúl, my husband, was supposedly in Cancun for company training. He had told me that he was coming back on Thursday, that it was all work, boring meetings and dinners with clients.
I read the screen three times.
“We’ve been together for almost a year. Today we got married on the beach. Don’t make dramas. You were always too cold for me.”
I did not scream. I did not cry. I didn’t even feel like throwing the cell phone against the wall. The only thing I felt was a very strange calm, as if my body had already cried for me at another time and now all that was left was to do the right thing.
Raúl and I had been married for seven years. The house was mine before I met him. I had bought it with years of working as an accountant in a dairy company.
He always said that we were “a team”, but that team worked because I paid the mortgage, the cards, the supermarket, the insurance and even the fines that he accumulated for driving as a teenager.
I answered only one thing:
“Excellent.”
Then I blocked it.
At 3:10 I opened my online banking. I canceled the additional supermarket card, the gasoline card, the travel card and the one he used “for emergencies only”.
I changed passwords for the bank, the email, the cameras, the electric gate and even the application where the lights in the room were controlled.
At 3:45 I called a locksmith.
—Right now, ma’am? —he asked half asleep.
—I’ll pay you double if it arrives before dawn.
At 4:30, Don Ernesto was changing the entrance plate. He saw my face, saw the message and just said:
—I’m going to put a security one on it, one of the good ones.
At 5:20, my house became mine again.
I slept two hours.
