When I heard my husband telling his friends, between bursts of laughter, that he doubted “this joke of a marriage” would last another year because I “wasn’t even on his level,” something inside me broke—but not in my voice.

The table fell silent for a second—the kind of awkward silence that not even the music in the Malasaña bar could cover. Sergio let out a nervous chuckle. Diego, Javier’s best friend since high school, looked away uncomfortably.

Javier raised an eyebrow, drunk on ego and beer.

“Don’t be dramatic, Lucía, it was a joke,” he said, lifting his hand. “See? She’s sensitive. That’s what I mean—she doesn’t match my pace.”

“Perfect,” I replied, setting my glass on the table. “Then each of us can follow our own.”

I stood up slowly, put on my leather jacket, and picked up my bag. No one moved. No one said a word. I only heard a muffled cough and the murmur of a couple at the bar.

“Lucía, come on, sit down, don’t make a scene,” Javier added, not even bothering to stand.

I looked at him one more time. The man who had been my husband for seven years—the brilliant architect, the boy from a wealthy family in Salamanca, the one who always said that with me he had “married beneath his level.” Suddenly I saw him with strange clarity: small, ridiculous, surrounded by hollow laughter.

“This isn’t a show,” I replied. “It’s your ending.”

And I left.