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.

“At Christmas, when he closed the contract with the Barcelona studio, he got drunk. He said your marriage was a ‘temporary investment’ and that as soon as he signed that project and secured the bonus, he’d leave you. Sergio, like an idiot, told him he didn’t have the guts. So they made a bet.”

I felt my jaw tighten.

“A bet… about me?”

“About your life,” Diego corrected quietly. “Javier bet that you would endure another whole year, no matter how much he humiliated you in public, while he started ‘preparing the transition’ to a woman ‘at his level.’ Literally. Those were his words.”

The café around me faded slightly. The lamp above us, the waitress collecting teaspoons—everything felt distant.

“And you were there?” I asked.

“Yes. And I didn’t say anything,” he admitted. “I laughed like the others. At first I thought it was just another one of his boasts. But then I saw the way he spoke to you, the way you were fading. And tonight… tonight he crossed a line.”

I wanted to hate him in that moment as much as I hated Javier. But the only thing I felt was a strange calm, a kind of emptiness where the pain used to be.

“Why are you telling me now?” I asked. “Why not months ago?”