Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

1. 22

Jaime is heavy.

He’s heavy, resting on top of her, and he smells like one of the aftershaves from the shop. It’s a popular one, and now that she thinks of it, they’d been running low the other day, and she had forgotten to order more to be brought in from the warehouse. It would be all right; Sofía, a saleswoman who has been working in the shop since before Marta learned to walk, would have noticed and made the order before she left for the day. But Sofía, despite her experience, remains a saleswoman, while Marta was appointed store manager just six months ago, without ever having worked in the store before. So when she’s back at work, Sofía will make a point of telling Marta that she covered one of her responsibilities, and would force Marta to thank her, and they would both walk away with the uncomfortable reminder of —

Jaime moves, slipping out of her, and flops onto his back beside her on the bed, one arm outstretched beneath her head. She brings her knees together, easing some of that knotted tension in her pelvis, and rolls onto her side to face him. Her inner thighs are slick with some kind of fluid, and she remembers the mortifying conversation she had with Digna a few nights earlier. You might bleed a little, Sweetheart. Some pain is normal. It’s a good idea to use the toilet afterward, if you can slip away for a moment without offending Jaime.

Marta has read the poets, the novelists, the great tales of longing and desire fulfilled. She had wanted to ask Digna about that part of it, about why this is something people love if it’s bloody and uncomfortable and sends you to the bathroom, but she couldn’t make the words come out. Seduction, she’d assumed, was part of it. There would be things Jaime would do to make her want this, and it would make all the rest of it worthwhile.

He turns his head to face her, now, his eyes glowing with that bright, almost excessive intensity that he so often fixes on her. She wants to tell him that he can stop that, now. They’re married. It’s done. He doesn’t have to try so hard anymore.

“How do you feel?” he asks, reaching across to caress her cheek with his thumb.

Marta smiles at him. “Fine.”

For just a moment, the intensity in his eyes flickers, and Marta realizes what a terrible answer that had been, even if it had been the honest one. She feels fine; it was fine, but of course he had wanted her to tell him she was happy, that she enjoyed it, that it was wonderful.

But it hadn’t been wonderful. Not really.

It was fine.

Jaime was gentle, and he had been patient with her. She had wished for the knowledge that would have come from some kind of prior experience: some sense of what to do with her hands or her lips to make him feel like she appreciated him. Instead, she had felt like an awkward, stiff-limbed doll while he undressed her and then, with a flash of apology in his eyes as though he’d forgotten this part of things, himself.

After some time spent kissing and touching, naked, Jaime had slipped his hand between her thighs and touched her with his fingers. She’d managed to quell every instinct to squirm away, but still he frowned a little, and then kissed her.

“Let me try something,” he said, and then kissed his way down her body, until he settled his shoulders between her thighs and pressed his tongue between—

“Jaime!” Marta couldn’t help it: she laughed in embarrassment and shoved him away with a palm to the top of his head. “What are you doing?”

He crawled up from under the sheet and opened his mouth to reply, and then seemed to think better of it and ducked to nuzzle at her breasts again.

It went like this for awhile. Eventually, he asked if she would touch him, so she did, and he responded with a small groan of pleasure, pressing his body into her side. She liked that, knowing that she was making him feel good. So she ran her hands along him again, and yet again, until he stopped her and urged her onto her back. He held himself over her with one hand and touched her again with the other, those gentle, probing fingers. It felt a little better now than it had before, less strange, and she found that she could enjoy the intimacy of it, of being touched like this by someone she trusted and cared for. It wasn’t magical, nothing like in her novels, but it was nice enough.

Something inscrutable flashed over his eyes again, just for a second. Then that hand left her body and curled over his own mouth. He half-turned his head as though trying to hide what he was doing, but she could tell that he was spitting into his palm. She felt herself tense with embarrassment. Marta’s body had never struck her, or anyone else, as especially feminine, and this seemed only to be an extension of that: where womanhood was supposed to be soft and gentle and fluid, everything about Marta was angular and stiff and rigid and dry. Jaime, reading her discomfort, had bent and kissed her cheek, then her neck.

“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s just like this for some women.”

Then he slid his fingers, slick with saliva, between her legs again.

It helped. His touch felt better wet than it had when it was dry, and she finally felt something stirring, a low hum deep in her pelvis. He must have felt something too, because he smiled.

“Are you ready?”

She supposed she was. “Yes.”

So he settled his hips between her legs, and he did it.

It was painful for a moment, but the pain passed. And then it was fine. It was all fine. He moved gently, and then more erratically, and then he seized up, and she felt something twitch as he finished.

And then he collapsed on top of her, and he was heavy.

And then he rolled away and lay on his back, panting.

She feels slick between her thighs, and thinks about the bathroom and Digna’s advice. But then Jaime curls the arm that rests under her shoulders, rolling her so that she lies along his side, her head settling in the hollow between his shoulder and chest, her torso along the length of his, so she can feel the movement of his breath. He smells of aftershave and, not unpleasantly, of sweat, and she sinks into him, into the ways she has let him hold her on nights before this night, just now with nothing but skin between them. This, she thinks, is nice. This might be the nicest part of it all, his body solid and comforting against hers. She is always cold, but he is warm, and he wraps her in his arms and the blankets without her having to ask. He kisses the top of her head and runs his fingers through her hair, and that is the loveliest thing she’s felt all evening; she wants to arch into it like a cat, the pleasant tingles of his blunt nails along her scalp.

“I love you,” he breathes. “I can’t believe you’re my wife.”

She smiles, settling closer, presses a kiss to his chest where she lays. “I love you, too.”

But he is breathing deeply, and she realizes he is already asleep.

2. 22, later

Marta sits beside her father in the back seat of the family car.

The previous hour ranks among the most humiliating of her life.

Her father had taken her with him to the bank, telling her he wanted to have her registered as a signatory on the corporate accounts, entitled to solicit records and make withdrawals on behalf of the business, and to access their safe-deposit box there. She had known their banker for a long time, a middle-aged, rosy-cheeked man named Guillermo, and he greeted her like an old friend with a handshake and the obligatory dos besos. But she didn’t miss how his eyes took in her clothing, one of the new skirt sets with matching jackets that she’s purchased to suit her new corporate role. She feels a bit like she’s wearing a costume in this suit, but a fun one, like a child dressing up as a knight: it protects her, like armor. Her suit today is made of grey wool, warm for the late autumn chill, with clean-cut lapels that offset the shine of her mother’s pearls.

“Doña Marta,” Guillermo said jovially, “So wonderful to see you, and may I congratulate you again on such a beautiful wedding last month. My wife and I had the most wonderful time.”

“Thank you,” Marta said, for lack of anything else to offer. The title still feels new to her. Her father had encouraged her to start using it two years ago, when she was twenty and came home from Italy, but she had largely ignored his nudging, happy enough to stick with Señorita whenever titles were necessary. But now that she is married and taking on more authority in the company, he has made clear that the formal address is no longer optional. So she tries not to flinch when she hears it, and trusts that eventually it will stop feeling like she is being greeted by someone else’s name.

In Guillermo’s office, Marta and her father took their seats in the leather chairs. But when her father had explained the purpose of their visit, Guillermo’s ever-present grin faltered.

“Don Damián.” He leaned toward her father over the desk. “You know I can’t do that.”

“Oh, don’t worry, old friend,” Father had replied, reaching into his jacket for an envelope, “I have a letter of permission from her husband right here.”

Guillermo looked at the envelope, but made no move to pick it up from where Damian had set it on the mahogany. “It’s not that,” he said, and then glanced at Marta out of the corner of his eye, like he was afraid she might overhear. “It’s the law, you see. Women can’t be signatories on–”

“Oh, come now,” her father had interrupted. “Surely we’re not going to be bound by that silly rule?”

“Silly or not, it’s the law,” Guillermo had replied.

And so they’d gone on and on, back and forth, talking about her. In the moment, the task of keeping her mouth shut had felt arduous. I’m right here, she’d been desperate to interrupt, perhaps you might want to ask what I think?  But one thing that had become clear was that Guillermo did not, in fact, care what she thought, and even if she raised her voice to be heard, she had no idea what she might say that could impact the outcome.  Women, by law, cannot have signing authority on corporate bank accounts.

“I’ll speak to the lawyer the moment we get home,” Father says now, in the car beside her. “I’m sure he’ll find us a workaround.”

This is code, of course. Guillermo lacks the authority to violate the law in service of bank business, but there are surely executives there willing to do what’s necessary to protect their ongoing relations with the voluminous accounts of one of Toledo’s largest businesses, and if that executive also comes away with, say, a new Porsche, or the means to take his family on an extra-long vacation to the Costa del Sol, well, so much the better for him. And the tellers and functionaries with whom Marta would most regularly interact as signatory, including Guillermo, will not take the risk of challenging an order from an executive office.

But it remains insulting—dehumanizing, even—to encounter, so directly, how authority for her cannot be earned, only purchased, and that the gatekeepers of that authority feel no qualms about discussing it right over her head, oblivious to the irony of her own authority being something she has no say over.

“All right. Let me know what he says,” Marta replies to her father. She doesn’t take her eyes off the world beyond the car window.

Her father seems to pick up that she is not interested in continuing the conversation, so he shifts his attention to Isidro, inviting him to banter about the rivalries of the Madrid football teams, which Isidro takes up gladly. Marta sits still and bored, the familiar streets beyond the window failing to hold her interest, so after a moment she opens her father’s briefcase and helps herself to the top file inside. He has been teaching her how to parse the business’s various financial documents and ledgers, and she might as well spend the time reviewing whatever is here, for practice if nothing else. The numbers paint a picture that she is growing ever-more adept at visualising, and she settles into its interpretation, reminding herself that regardless of the skepticism of the Guillermos of the world, she is more than capable of understanding the world of business.

Damian shifts his weight, leaning forward against the back of the front seat. “Isn’t that Fina over there?”

She lifts her head at that. They are passing the public girls’ school just as it is letting out for the day. The building and its surrounding walls are still crumbling in places, not yet repaired from the damage they suffered during the war. Marta’s parents had shipped her out to school in Italy during the worst of the fighting, where she had stayed until war broke out in Italy, too. So scenes like this, so banale for most Spaniards, remain incongruous to her: dozens of tidily-uniformed schoolgirls chatting in clusters, laughing, calling out to one another, against the backdrop of a barely-rebuilt war zone.

“Yes, Sir,” Isidro replies, but Marta hadn’t needed the confirmation to recognize Fina standing near the gate. Fina is the closest thing to a peer Marta has had growing up in the Big House, which is not terribly close given their difference in age and position. Fina is thirteen now, shedding her girlhood like a snakeskin, and the woman she’s becoming is a striking one: slender, but filling out in the shoulders and hips. Marta can imagine how, in a few years, Fina will look like she walked off one of those Nationalist propaganda posters Marta saw everywhere during the lead-up to the war, when she herself had a teenager, barely any older than Fina is now. Those posters featured women with hourglass figures like the one Fina is developing, built to carry and raise the next generation of Spaniards.

There are still posters, of course. Different ones, to match a more modern aesthetic. But from time to time Marta will still see one of those old ones, hidden behind some old bins or halfway down an alley, worn and peeling but still clinging under cracked yellow paste, almost a decade old now. And every time, she remembers how those posters haunted her when they were new. Puberty had gifted Marta with six inches of excess height but no hips or breasts to speak of. She had navigated those excruciating adolescent years feeling like an ugly stepsister, all knobby joints and straight lines and sharp angles, tight and rigid, more likely to crack like old rubber than to bend with appealing feminine fluidity.

Fina is on her way to becoming as tall as Marta, but she is already disarming: strong but soft, exuding good humour, a textbook model of young womanhood. So of course, Marta notices Fina there, on the sidewalk, among her classmates. Marta can’t help but notice Fina, because due to no fault or intent of her own, Fina is incredibly noticeable.

“Is she coming home now? We should pick her up,” Father says.

Isidro’s eyes flick up to the rear-view mirror, then back to the road. “Oh, that’s all right, Sir. She’ll catch her bus soon.”

“No, no,” Damián insists amiably. “Why waste time and money on the bus when there’s an empty seat beside you and we’re right here? And it looks like it could rain any minute.”

So Isidro drives the car around the block and then pulls over near where Fina is standing with a cluster of her friends. He opens the window and calls out to her; her head snaps around, dark hair swinging loose over her shoulders, and when she sees him, she breaks out in her wide, easy smile. With a wave of the hand, he beckons her and points to the seat beside him, and she bids her friends a quick farewell and runs across the street and around to the passenger side door.

As Isidro pulls the car back out into traffic, Fina greets them. “Hello, Don Damián, Mart—"

Isidro clears his throat, and Fina corrects herself. “Doña Marta. Thank you for letting me ride home with you.”

“Of course, Fina,” Father replies. “How was your day at school?”

“It was fine, Sir, thank you for asking.”

That is, Marta knows, a practiced answer. When Fina had been a child living in the house with them, she had been given the liberties that one grants to children: to speak and move somewhat freely, and to treat the members of the de la Reina family as one might expect a child to treat the people who share her home. But for a few years, now, she has come to learn the rules of her status, and what it means that she accesses that same home from the back door and shares a room with her father on the lowest floor. A question from Don Damián about her school day would have been met with an effusive answer a few years earlier, but now, Fina has learned that the question is merely a polite gesture, and not one that she is usually expected—or desired—to answer beyond rote.

Marta wonders how her school day actually was.

“That’s good,” Father replies, by equal rote, and then nobody speaks for the rest of the drive back to the colonia.

Isidro drops Marta at the store before driving onward to the house. She spends the next two hours working with the salesgirls and updating the inventory registers, and then drives her own car home. Four steps through the front door and she hears a harsh sigh of the kind only a thirteen-year-old is capable. And then she hears Digna’s voice, a soft murmur: “Sweetheart.”

Digna and Fina are in the living room, and Marta pauses just outside the frame, where they can’t see her.

“He went on and on about it. ‘Your mothers’ this, ‘your mothers’ that. Only your mothers can teach you what you need to know to become women.” Fina puts on a pinched, affected voice for that last part, and Marta immediately knows she is quoting Father Enrique, the school’s medieval priest, a patronizing fart probably old enough to have known Jesus in person.

“You know I’ll always be here for you,” Digna says gently. “I’ll be here to help you with all of that.”

Fina sniffs, and Marta understands her lack of response. Marta lost her own mother three years ago, and she knows—like Fina does—that nobody should promise to be around forever.

“Well, Esther saw that I was upset,” Fina says. “So she raised her hand and said, ‘Father, what if we want to go to secondary school?’ You should have seen his face, Digna, it got all twisted up like a toilet bowl flushing before he could stop himself. And then he said, ‘Husbands prefer to take wives who haven’t wasted their time on studies when they could have been learning how to keep a home.’”

Digna laughs. “He didn’t say that!”

“He did!” Marta can hear the laughter in Fina’s voice now. “And Esther said, ‘Well, I don’t think I ever want a husband, then,’ and I couldn’t help myself. I said, ‘Me, neither!’ and the Father looked like he was going to have a heart attack right there in the classroom, and I think the only reason they didn’t haul us both off to get strapped was because they knew Esther only said it to get him to stop talking about mothers when she knew it was upsetting me.”

Marta’s spine stiffens. She’d made it all the way through her schooling without ever receiving as much as a ruler to the knuckles from her teachers. But Fina, she knows, has taken a few leather straps to the palms over the years, a consequence of speaking out of turn. Strangely, Marta has always admired her for it: it is Fina’s nature, she knows, to speak what she thinks is true, no matter what it might cost her. I wish she’d learn a few things from you, Señorita, Isidro said to Marta once, years earlier. She’s headstrong, like her mother. Doesn’t know when it’s best to keep her thoughts to herself.

The memory is enough to break her eavesdropping trance, and Marta makes her way to the stairs.

In her room, Marta sets her briefcase down next to her chest of drawers. When she stands, she is confronted with her reflection in the wall mirror, her grey skirt-suit a little rumpled from the day’s wear, but still tidy, professional. She looks like she expects to be taken seriously. But as she runs a hand down her stomach, over her hip, she remembers what Fina had looked like as she jogged across the street to reach their car, a beautiful girl on her way to becoming an even more beautiful woman, and here is Marta, as tall and straight as a streetlamp and about as sensual, too.

Beside the mirror is Jaime’s nightstand. She has to remind herself to think of it as his, even though this has been her room for most of her life, and he only slept there three nights before he returned to the boat. Each night, they had been intimate in this bed, and Jaime had looked at her like he never wanted to look away, but by the third night his eyes had flickered with disappointment when she had been no more enthusiastic than she’d been on the first.

Last year, just a few days before they got engaged, they’d gone to see The Philadelphia Story together at the cinema. Afterward, they’d strolled to a nearby restaurant for supper, loose and happy from having laughed so much, and Jaime said, “Anyone ever tell you that you look just like Katharine Hepburn?”

Marta’s eyebrows must have shot up to her hairline, and she back-handed him gently on the shoulder. “What? Don’t be silly.”

“I’m not being silly!”

“Jaime—”

“I’m not! You look just like her, tall and regal and poised. A modern icon. The woman of the future, Marta, that’s you.”

She had decided, right then, that if he asked her to marry him, she would agree. Because he called her beautiful and convinced her that he believed it, yes. But even more because he cared that she believed it. Because she enjoyed his easy company, and because she knew to the depths of her soul that he would only ask her to marry him if he truly desired to make her happy.

And then, not long after, as she expected, he proposed to her. And now they are married. And she does believe, truly, that he wants her, and that he wants her to be happy with him. Before he left for his ship, he had made sure the banks would give her full access to the accounts in his name, and he had written that letter for Father supporting their petition for her to be given access to the company accounts. That was more than many husbands would have done.

Marta grits her teeth. Is this, truly, what she’s expected to be grateful for?

Without thinking, she heads out of her room and makes her way downstairs, to the living room. Fina and Digna are still there, sitting on one of the sofas and talking, ignoring Fina’s history textbook laid out on the coffee table. Fina jumps to her feet when Marta enters, and Marta supposes that Isidro has been coaching her on that, too. Before this moment, Marta is not sure she would have thought anything about how Fina should behave when she, or any other member of the family, enters a room. This house is Fina’s home, just as it is her own, and Fina is here with Digna, who is not a member of the house staff. She should sit if she wants to sit.

But Marta doesn’t say anything.

Digna approaches her, arms open for a greeting. “Darling,” she says, “I heard about the bank. Don’t worry, your father will get it straightened out.”

Digna hugs her, and Marta does her best to offer a smile.

“Please, sit,” Marta finally says to Fina, who is still hovering awkwardly near the sofa. With a look of relief, Fina flops back down where she was sitting before.

“I didn’t intend to disturb you,” Marta continues. “I just—I overheard you a few minutes ago.” Her eyes shift from Fina’s face to the textbook and back again.

Fina bites her lip. “I’m sorry, Marta, I know I need to learn to be quieter.”

Digna opens her mouth, and Marta shakes her head subtly. She knows that Digna intends to correct the title as Isidro did in the car, and this is not the moment for that. Fina is not a member of the staff of this house. Fina is a child who lives here, and she has known Marta since she was born, and Marta will not suddenly become a new person to her just because she is supposed to address her by a different word.

“No, it’s not that,” Marta says. “I didn’t mind. I just wanted to ask: was it Father Enrique who tried to suggest you should leave school after this year?”

Fina half-smiles, and she nods.

Marta feels herself bark a dry, unladylike laugh. “Well, don’t listen to that old idiot. Don’t quit, Fina. I mean it. No matter how hard they try to convince you. I’ll drive you every morning myself if I have to.”

“I wasn’t planning to,” Fina says, still with a little half-smile. “My mother always said that knowledge was the only possession nobody could ever steal.”

Adela had died long before the war, and long before anyone could have imagined what it would leave in its wake for her daughter, and for Marta, and for most women in Spain. And still, her words were prophetic.

“She was right,” Marta says. “The only power they can’t take from us is the power to think for ourselves.”

Marta approaches the coffee table and picks up Fina’s history textbook, flipping absently through a few pages, and then closing it and holding it out for Fina to take in her hands. “It will get harder, and they won’t help you when you struggle. But I will, if you need it, all right? Just find me and ask.”

Fina’s eyes dart down to the textbook cover and then back up to Marta. “All right. Thank you, Mar—Doña Marta.”

Digna clears her throat, and Marta startles—she had, however briefly, forgotten she was there. Marta looks over at her now, where she’s just off to Marta’s side, and Digna is looking at her with a fond expression. Marta finds it inexplicably irritating, Digna’s faintly patronizing pride, as though Marta had offered Fina a share of her sandwich and not help completing an education that neither school, church, nor government wants to give her. But before Marta can act on her annoyance, Digna brings her hands together, indicating a change in topic.

“It will be time to eat soon, Marta. Let’s go to the dining room.”

“I should go downstairs and see if my father needs me,” Fina says, standing, textbook in her hands. But then she looks at Marta again. “Thank you, again, Doña Marta. I mean it.”

And Marta smiles, feeling like despite everything, something worthwhile has come from this wasted day.

Chapter Text

3.9

Marta is very excited about her new shoes.

They are navy blue leather with silver buckles, and she desperately tries to convince her mother to let her wear them right out of the store. But Mamá tells her that, no, she has to wait to wear them for the first time on Sunday, for church.

“Your feet are growing so fast, Darling. Let’s keep them clean for at least one Mass, all right?”

Marta sighs, forlorn, and puts her old yellow shoes back on. They are so babyish it’s almost embarrassing, she thinks. She is nine years old, for goodness’ sake; it’s time she should be allowed to wear some more grown-up things more often than just for Mass.

At least she likes her new shoes. Jesús and Andres have new shoes too, shiny black ones, and when they were trying them on, both of them complained that the stiff heels hurt. Jesús threatened to kick his off and all the way across the store, and Marta thought that he was not behaving like someone who is twelve years old should behave. Mother had sighed, told him to remove them like a man, please, and then asked the shop assistant to pack them up.

“You won’t have to wear them until Sunday,” she says to both of the boys, and Jesus rolls his eyes, but Andres seems satisfied enough.

Outside, they all climb into the family’s large white motor-car.

Marta can remember when the car had appeared in their driveway two years ago. “Look!” her father had said, holding out his arm like he’d been announcing a performer in a show, “this is how we’ll get around, now! I just have to hire us a chauffeur to drive it.”

And not long after, a man named Isidro had shown up. He had brown hair and a big moustache, and the first time he met Marta, he crouched down before her and made a small white flower suddenly appear out of nowhere between his hands, which he presented to her as a gift.

Her jaw had dropped. “Señor Isidro, can you do magic?”

“You can just call me Isidro, Señorita. And,” he cocked his head and tapped his nose, “a magician never reveals his secrets.”

Marta decided right away that she liked Isidro.

Isidro’s wife is named Adela, and she was hired to work in the house and the garden. They moved together into a room on the staff floor. In the garden, Adela showed Marta all the different flowers, explaining how some liked more sun and some liked more shade.

But today, when they are out buying new shoes and clothes, there is a different man driving the car for them. Marta doesn’t know why, but her mother had said that Isidro and Adela are very busy with their “new development” and that Isidro will be back to work in a day or two. Marta has no idea what any of that means, except that Isidro isn’t gone forever, to her relief. She doesn’t remember the name of this driver, but Mamá said that he normally drives trucks for the fabrica.

Marta sits in the car between her mother and Andres. Jesús takes the seat in front, next to the driver.

“Did you know they drive cars in races?” Andres announces to nobody in particular. “So fast! Just, vrrrroooom! I want to drive a race car when I grow up.”

“Maybe one day you will,” Mamá replies.

Marta thinks that maybe it would be fun for her to drive a race car, too, but she doesn’t say that. Race car driving doesn’t seem like the kind of thing girls do.

The strange chauffeur drops them by the front door of the house. Jesús leads them all inside and makes a beeline for the stairs to go up to his room, but Marta immediately stops in the hallway.

“Isidro!” she exclaims, delighted. “Adela!”

Because they are standing close to each other in the middle of the front hall, the first time in three days that Marta has seen them. She flings herself at Isidro, throwing her arms around his waist in greeting, and he lets out his deep, rumbling laugh.

“Oh ho, Señorita!” he exclaims, pressing a hand between her shoulders to return the hug. “Hello to you too! Did you have a good shopping trip?”

“Yes! I got blue shoes, and Andres—”

“Now, now, Marta, give Isidro a little room to breathe.”

Marta looks up. It’s her father. She hadn’t even noticed him, but he was clearly having a conversation with Isidro and Adela. Looking over, now, she sees that Adela is carrying something in her arms—and it moves.

“Oh my goodness, she’s beautiful!”  Marta’s mother has come to stand beside Adela, and she’s looking down at the bundle in Adela’s arms.

Suddenly Marta understands: it’s the baby. She knew that Adela had a baby in her stomach, and now her stomach is smaller, so this must be that baby now.

“She’s perfect,” Adela says, smiling down into her arms. “We’re so happy.”

“What is her name?” Mamá asks.

“Serafina,” Adela replies. “Our little angel. We've already started calling her Fina between us.”

“What a perfect name for such a perfect little gift from God,” Mamá says. “I know you’ve been praying for a child for many years.”

“We had been starting to think a baby may just not be on the path laid out for us,” Isidro says. “But now here she is, all fingers and toes accounted for.”

“Well, we’re all so very happy for you,” says Father. “And know that this house will always be a home for her, as it is for you.”

“Thank you, Don Damián,” Isidro says. Marta’s arms are still around his waist, her cheek pressed to his side, and he pats her back fondly as he looks down at her again. “What do you think, Señorita? Will you help us to keep an eye on little Fina as she grows up?” His eyes shift. “And you, Señor?”

Marta turns to follow his gaze. Andres is there, standing not too far away from her. She hadn’t noticed he had stayed when Jesús left.

He is shy, and still small, far less comfortable talking about important things than talking about driving race cars, but he makes a serious face and nods. Marta, however, is very happy to discuss important things. She nods too.

“I bet you’d like to hold her!” Father exclaims. “Adela, could Marta hold the baby for a moment?”

Marta steps away from Isidro, her arms going stiff at her sides. It didn’t occur to her to want to hold the baby. But, she supposes, this is what it must mean to start being prepared to take on some responsibilities for the family. She already does some things, like helping Andres to cross the street when they’re out with Mamá.

Adela smiles and steps past Isidro to face Marta. “What do you think? Would you like to hold her?”

Marta swallows, nervous, but nods.

“Isidro,” Adela says, “I don’t think I can bend well enough yet.”

So Isidro takes the bundled baby from Adela’s arms and then crouches low in front of Marta. “Hold your arms out.”

She does, and he cradles the little swaddled newborn against her chest.

Little Serafina is funny-looking and not particularly cute at all, Marta thinks. She has black hair poking out from under the blankets, and her face is pinched, eyes squeezed closed, like she sucked on a lemon. Isidro keeps his hand between Marta’s, under the baby’s bottom, and Marta is relieved at his help, because she realizes that she is perhaps not quite ready to handle the responsibility of holding a baby all by herself after all.

“There you go!” Isidro says to her.

“A natural,” Adela adds.

Serafina starts to squirm a little, and then her eyes open. They are brown, and when they fix themselves on Marta’s face, they immediately begin to crumple. That sour-lemon puckered look grows tighter still, cheeks suddenly reddening, and then Fina lets out a wail that seems far too loud to have come out of that tiny body.

Marta flinches, and Isidro laughs. “Whoops!” he says, scooping Fina out of Marta’s arms and depositing her in Adela’s. Adela tucks her face down to Fina’s face, cooing at her, and Fina settles almost immediately.

“Not quite ready to be away from her mother just yet,” Mother says, smiling.

Marta is strangely embarrassed for having made the baby cry so quickly. She should have known what to say, or what to do, to calm her down, surely, if she is old enough for them to have trusted her to hold her in the first place.

Isidro must notice, because he pats her on the shoulder.

“I’m very happy our Fina will be growing up in the same house as you, Señorita,” he says. “You’ll be the only girls, but I know you’ll be a perfect role model for her.”

“I’ll do my best,” Marta says, as seriously as she can, and is promptly mortified when all the adults burst out laughing, which in turn makes Fina start crying again. Adela starts once more to make soothing sounds, and Father bends down and pats Marta on the cheek.

“I’m sure you will, Daughter,” he says, his eyes sparkling. “I’m quite sure you will.”

4. 36

At first, Marta wonders if it’s the wine.

She feels both fuzzy and sharp. Her skin burns, each seam of her slip chafing as the fabric of her dress moves and shifts between her body and the sheets.

Between her body and Fina’s hands.

Fina is gentle with her, and so patient that Marta could almost cry from the tenderness of it. They lay on the bed and kiss each other breathless while Fina’s hands slowly roam the embroidered surface of Marta’s dress over her upper chest, her shoulders, her back. By the time Fina finally grips the zipper at the base of her neck and eases it down along her spine, by the time she slips her fingers under the fabric to scratch at the skin of her spine above the top of her slip, Marta is already half-drunk with unfamiliar desire. Fina kisses her again and the blood rushes in Marta’s ears, and Fina coaxes Marta onto her back on the bedspread, and yes, it’s the wine, it must be the wine making her feel this way—

But no, it’s not. Marta wraps her arms around Fina’s neck and shivers as Fina settles herself down onto Marta’s body, and it is definitely not the wine Marta is feeling now.

Here, under Fina’s weight, Marta feels herself young again, awkward and inexperienced, even if she is also excited. The flat lines of her silhouette feel all the more brittle when pressed against Fina’s soft, slow curves. When Fina pauses in her kissing to watch her hand trail down the side of Marta’s torso, Marta struggles not to feel like she is being appraised, judged, about to be found wanting.

“Fina,” Marta whispers, but she doesn’t know what to say next. It is frustrating to find herself the blushing beginner for her second first time, especially with a partner as much younger as Jaime had been older.

Fina shakes her head instead of replying, and then dives down and kisses Marta full and slow, and Marta feels every part of herself yielding, opening, softening. Her breath comes deeper, her ribs expanding, and she finds that for all her nervousness, she wants everything off—all her clothes, her undergarments, everything putting rough friction between Fina’s skin and her own.

Fina must feel something change in Marta’s body, because the huff of air against Marta’s cheek feels like a sigh, and then Fina’s fingers curl into the collar of Marta’s dress and begin to pull it open, down, over Marta’s shoulders and further, catching the straps of her slip and pulling those down, too. Marta half sits up to help slide the heavy thing off and down her legs, and then she hurries to tackle the buttons of Fina’s dress before she can stop to think about the fact that she’s lying next to Fina in nothing but her bra, underwear, and stockings.

Fina looks down at Marta’s fingers on her buttons, and then at Marta’s eyes.

“I can’t believe this is real,” Fina whispers.

Marta’s mouth feels too dry to speak, so she just smiles and bites her lip as another button comes free and her fingers brush the fabric of Fina’s bra.

Together, they manage to tug at each other's remaining clothing until they have both shed it all, leaving it cast haphazardly about the hotel carpet around the bed. Marta finds herself on her back, propped up on her elbows, with Fina kneeling on the bed beside her, her eyes tripping over Marta’s body. Marta feels herself about to apologize, to acknowledge that she’s never been much to look at underneath the wedding fashion or the tailored workday suits, that she has never had many of the qualities that most men find desirable in women. Her own gaze travels down Fina’s body and sees everything she had forced herself never to imagine: the strong shoulders, full breasts, narrow waist into the perfect rise of hip.

When her eyes track back up to Fina’s, she finds them watching her, pupils wide and dark, her lip caught between her teeth.

Then Fina lays down, her body half over Marta’s, smelling like Anhelos de Mujer and feeling like the softest thing Marta has ever touched, and Marta's impulse to apologize fades into nothing. Instead, she gathers up her courage and runs her hand from the dip of Fina’s waist up to her breast, letting herself feel its weight, delighting in how Fina shudders and gasps when she touches the nipple with her thumb. Fina responds by ducking to lick and suck at her throat. Marta’s heart starts to race even as her mind slows down, zeroing in on the places their bodies touch, where Fina’s knee puts the barest pressure on hers, where their stomachs brush against each other, where she can—dear God—feel coarse, soft hair against her thigh.

And then it hits her all at once, all of a sudden: a lurching desire to seize, to take and rend, to devour, to tear Fina to pieces if that is the only way she can possess her entirely. She wants to crawl into Fina’s skin, or have Fina crawl into hers. She wants to fill her mouth and her hands and every other part of herself with all the pieces of Fina that she can consume. She digs her fingernails into Fina’s shoulders and Fina hisses, but when Marta pulls back, prepared to apologize, she sees a look in Fina’s eyes that she knows is the mirror of her own.

“I have never wanted anyone like this,” Fina whispers through ragged breath.

Marta doesn’t know how to respond to that. Because too, has never wanted anyone like this before, but she knows now that she has never allowed herself to want anyone at all. Just a few years shy of 40 and she finally understands why this desire is called carnal, why the church fears it and why she already knows she will never be able to live without it again.

“I want you to have me,” is what she finally replies. Then she winds her fingers into Fina’s hair, lifts her head, and kisses her again.

And then Fina sets Marta’s body on fire.

No, it isn’t that. With her lips and tongue and fingers she turns Marta’s body into a paradox, fluid enough to move in waves but freezing into sudden spasms of rigidity, lava flowing into an ocean. Fina touches her with curiosity, with electricity, fingers sparking static over Marta’s skin, lips and tongue following with soothing cool. The tip of her nose trails over the bumps of Marta’s ribs. Her tongue greets every freckle and mole on Marta’s stomach. Without looking, without touching, Marta knows how wet she has become, and spares half a thought for all the times she had thought she wasn’t capable of it, that her body would never give more than the minimum necessary to make an uncomfortable penetration possible. But when Fina kisses Marta’s throat and her fingers finally slip between Marta’s legs, Fina sighs, and Marta curls helplessly into that touch. And when Fina’s fingers ease inside her, Marta groans with the perfect pressure of it, the way it feels like she’s been given everything she’s never known she craved.

She has, of course allowed herself to be penetrated before, but has never felt what it meant to take another person inside herself like this, the way it can satisfy a primal craving, fill a hollow ache that yawns open in invitation. Fina's fingers are where they are, but somehow, the pressure of their movement drags along Marta’s nerve endings, driving a warm tide through her body that manifests as a tightening tension in her diaphragm, her lungs, the back of her throat, as though she has been possessed by a benevolent ghost. Fina's tongue finds Marta's breast and sparks a current that connects all the places where their bodies touch, and the cry that Marta lets out feels inevitable, the rising pressure forced to find release. But of course, no hotel walls are thick enough to keep them safe, and Marta finds the wherewithal to press her palm over her own mouth, muffling any other sound that might escape.

Fina releases Marta's nipple and trails up, over collarbone and throat and jaw, and kisses the back of the hand that Marta is using to so carefully contain herself. For a moment Fina hovers there, looking down into Marta’s eyes with her brow furrowed in concentration, teeth worrying her lower lip. Then she moves her fingers in a way that makes Marta's spine arch up into an impossible shape, and Marta clenches her teeth to keep herself quiet while Fina gasps as though she feels Marta's pleasure in her own body. She moves that way again, both her fingers deep inside Marta's body and her thumb on the outside, and Marta nearly bites into the meat of her own palm. It is an excruciating feeling, almost unbearable, but she never wants it to stop, she didn't know, she has never known—

She lifts her hand from her mouth. "Fina. Fina, I don't—I've never—"

There are no other words. She can feel her eyes rolling back, her body straining like a feral animal against some invisible rein, her breath coming in staccato pants. 

Fina's eyes flash, her hand faltering in its movement between Marta's legs. She half-frowns and then she exhales sharply, warm air against Marta's chin and cheeks, before ducking lower and pressing her forehead to Marta's. "My love. Do you need me to stop?"

For a moment Marta's brain hangs on the question, because she is hurtling toward a terrifying unknown and even now, even in this state, she is afraid of what it will mean to leap into that abyss. 

She will never come back from this.

But she meets Fina's gaze and sees, in that banked fire, a visceral desire that she can finally understand. And she is too far gone already to pretend that anything she chooses now will make her feel any safer.

"Don't stop." Marta cups Fina’s cheek, then curls her hand around the back of Fina's neck and manages to stop herself from digging her fingernails in. "Please don't stop, please."

So Fina kisses her firmly, hot and open, and her fingers move just as they had before, curling into sensitive places inside and outside Marta's body. And again. And again. With one hand, Marta clutches at Fina's arm just above the elbow. She can feel the muscles flexing and the answering ripple in her own body, as though they shared nerves and flesh. Marta drowns herself in Fina's mouth, in her scent, she grips at her arm with one hand and her hair with the other, and she lets herself become an extension of Fina's touch and her will and her warmth. She feels herself winding tighter, her lungs fighting for air, and Fina turns her head and kisses her deeper still, absorbing into her mouth every sound that tries to escape Marta's throat. 

And when Marta finally breaks, it doesn't feel like she's coming apart. It feels like a dull carapace has shattered open and bared the soft flesh hidden underneath, vibrant and brimming with new life, reaching for the light.

It takes a long time for Marta’s breath to return to some semblance of normal. Fina settles along Marta’s side again, working one arm under Marta’s neck to curl around her shoulders, and letting the other hand, the one with the slick and sticky fingers, rest on Marta’s waist.

Marta tries, and tries, and tries to wrap her mind around what she has just experienced. Her body feels foreign, but also better than it has ever felt, and Fina feels perfect against her. She wants to put her arms around Fina again but she can’t figure out how to make them work just yet. The after-effects of her orgasm drift through her bloodstream like a drug, making her heavy and loose.

And then, to her utter horror, she feels what’s about to happen.

Her arm wakes up enough to allow her to press her thumb an fingertips to her eyes, but there is no use trying to hold back a tide. The Marta who walked into this room could have stayed her own rising tears, but that Marta is gone, shed somewhere on the floor among all the clothes.

“My love,” Fina breathes, ducking her forehead down to Marta’s. “Are you all right?”

The only response Marta can give is to lift her fingers and meet Fina’s eyes with her own, knowing how wet and reddened they must be.

“Oh, Sweetheart,” Fina murmurs, nuzzling her nose along Marta’s. “Was that the first time you’ve ever—”

Marta nods. She doesn’t want to hear the word spoken, like it’s just some normal thing that bodies do, like it’s not something she has never really believed existed for women.

She can’t help but spare a miserable thought for Jaime. He has wanted to give that to her. He has wanted her to give that to him. She has thought he must believe in fairy tales.

But here she is, recovering from the effect of losing herself completely in another person’s body, another person’s touch and desire.

Another woman’s.

“I’m sorry,” is what she finally manages to say. “You must think I’m ridiculous right now.”

“No,” Fina says, tightening her hold on Marta’s shoulders. “Not at all. I just didn’t realize—I assumed that with your husband, at some point—”

“That has never, ever happened with him. He tries, but—I just get through it, with him. I don’t—I’ve never—"

"Oh, my love," Fina murmurs.

But Marta shakes her head, frustrated with herself. "I've never—For heaven’s sake, Fina, I’m like a child, I can barely bring myself to utter the words.”

“Had an orgasm,” Fina fills in, and that Fina can say it so easily does not help Marta’s sense of her own absurdity.

“I have never—had an orgasm, no. Not with him. Not ever." She closes her eyes, granting herself the reprieve of a few deep, slow breaths. "I thought it was me, maybe. I didn't think I could. Or I wondered if they were a lie."

She leaves unspoken that it was clearly not her, and clearly not a lie.

Fina caresses her hip with her thumb. “Did you enjoy it?”

Despite her red, watery eyes,Marta levels Fina with her best glare, the one that says Doña Marta Is Not Impressed With You Right Now.

Fina smiles and rolls her eyes in self-deprecation. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

“Yes, Fina, I liked it. God, I’m already wanting to start again.”

Fina’s gentle smile turns mischievous, her eyes self-satisfied. She pecks Marta on the lips. And then pecks her again.

It is a perfect antidote to the pressure that Marta feels herself carrying.

“Your wish is my command,” Fina says, raising her body up and over Marta’s again.

“Fina…” Marta offers a half-hearted note of protest, but it dies in her throat when Fina licks her nipple again. Marta’s hands go to Fina’s shoulders, clenching. Fina half-sits up and draws one of Marta’s hands to her mouth so she can kiss her palm, and then, with a smile, she places it over Marta’s own lips.

“You might need this,” she says. “I want to kiss you somewhere else this time.”

Marta knows what she is implying, remembers the lone miserable time that Jaime tried to use his mouth on her. But when Fina touches her with her tongue, Marta has no impulse to push her away. Instead all she can think is how badly she wants to put her mouth on Fina in the same way, how that is the closest she will ever come to being able to consume and devour her in all the monstrous ways her body suddenly desires.

Then Fina sucks something into her mouth, and Marta stops thinking entirely.

Later, when Marta’s nerves are slow and her body is wrung out, they lie together under the starched hotel sheets.

“I’ve had you in my arms before all this, you know,” Marta says.

Fina smiles and trails her fingers down the curve of Marta’s jaw. “Really? I’m pretty sure I’d remember.”

They lay on their sides, facing each other, with Fina’s knee slung over Marta’s hip, their skin still damp and clinging. 

Marta ducks closer until their foreheads touch and Fina’s breath warms her face. “I was nine,” she says. “You were probably about three days old.”

Fina laughs, then pecks Marta gently on the lips, and laughs again. “Well in that case, I’m sure I have no memory of it at all.”

Marta nods, smiling, her cheek catching against her pillowcase. She grasps Fina’s hand and tangles it up in her own, indulging in the pleasure of running her thumb over each of Fina’s fingertips.

“And I fell in love on the spot, I’m sure,” Fina says with a smile.

Marta bites her lip and cocks her eyebrow with something like embarrassment. “Hardly. You lasted about five seconds before you started screaming.”

“I didn’t!” Fina laughs, eyes wide with mirth, and Marta laughs, and shrugs, and smiles.

“You did!”

A moment of silence stretches, golden in the lamplight. The radiator awakens with a clanging noise of trapped steam. Marta tightens her grip around Fina’s hand. A quick scrub against the bedsheets hadn’t been enough to clean Fina’s fingers, and held between her hands and this close to both their faces, Marta can feel and smell where they’d been just a few minutes before. The potential for shame tickles the base of her skull, but she suppresses it by pressing a kiss to those fingertips, knowing full well the source of the taste they leave on her lips. 

Fina’s eyes darken. She slips her hand out of Marta’s grip and slides it down, under the sheet, until it curves over Marta’s breast. Marta rolls onto her back, drawing Fina over her, and inhales deeply, letting the expansion of her lungs lift her chest into Fina’s palm. Could she really go again, already? Is her body so desperate to make up for a lifetime of missed time?

“It would probably be tasteless,” Fina breathes, lips brushing the shell of Marta’s ear, “for me to joke that from the very moment you met me, you’ve known how to make me scream.”

Marta laughs again, but it comes out as a kind of gasping sigh as Fina’s teeth nip her earlobe, Fina’s thigh slipping between Marta’s legs.

“Tasteless, maybe,” Marta manages to utter, even as her back arches up of its own volition, her body already yearning for more, yet again. “But it’s a lie, anyway. I haven’t made you make a sound yet.”

A chuckle, a kiss to the side of Marta’s neck, a playful pinch to Marta’s nipple, and then a gentle covering of Marta’s hand—resting fairly chastely, now, along Fina’s ribs—to invite it higher, to touch more intimate places.

“You will,” Fina whispers, and then her body bends, pushing itself into Marta’s hand. “I know you will.”

Marta will. She must. She wants to, so desperately.

She props herself up on her elbow and urges Fina onto her back.

“I think I’ll try now,” she says, before she dips her tongue into Fina’s mouth just as she drives her thumb into the soft, sensitive crease between thigh and hip. Fina’s breath hitches, her knee tipping outward so that Marta can settle between her legs, the low swell of her stomach feeling the moisture clinging to Fina’s pubic hair. She understands, now, why Fina hadn’t been put off by her own wetness. She feels herself marked by the evidence of Fina’s desire, and it gives her a sense of predatory pride to wear that kind of belonging.

“I might need your help,” she says, licking the hollow between Fina’s breasts.

“I’ll help you—if you need it,” Fina says, her breath hitching when Marta nips at her waist. “But anything you do will be perfect.”

Marta drags her lips up and sucks Fina’s nipple into her mouth, and Fina’s entire body jolts.

“Don’t you know, Marta,” she whispers, her head tipping back, neck arching. “Don’t you know that you have always been perfect to me?”

Chapter Text

5. 37

In her arms, Fina trembles.

She feels fragile in a way that Marta has only once felt before: after she came home from jail. Not in the immediate aftermath—she had been strong, then, in a brittle kind of way, like iron improperly tempered in a forge. But later, after she had confessed to Marta about what had happened with Santiago, she had softened, and gradually had allowed Marta to hold her, to caress her, to let their kisses linger for longer than fleeting moments.

And then, one evening, she had thrown a knee over Marta’s hips and guided Marta’s hands to the hem of her nightgown. She had let Marta undress her, and she had undressed Marta. Her body had trembled then, like it does now. Instinct had driven Fina to flinch away from Marta’s touch on her bare skin, and that had made Marta flinch away too, wary of doing anything that might cause her deeper harm. But Fina, with a determined glint in her eyes, had drawn Marta’s hands back to rest on her hips, and then had leaned in to trail kisses up Marta’s neck.

“I want you,” she whispered.

“I’m here,” Marta replied. “There’s no rush.”

Marta had felt Fina shake her head, her forehead brushing the crook of Marta’s jaw. “Please touch me,” she murmured. “My body is afraid, but my heart has been longing for you since the day I came home.”

And so Marta had made love to her slowly, with feather-light hands and a gentle, soothing mouth. Whenever Fina twitched or shivered, Marta would calm her by running her palms down the long muscles of her back or her thighs. When Fina finally came, hips pressing into Marta’s mouth, it was with an entirely different kind of orgasm: one that grew without tension, a wave not breaking but unfurling, every muscle languid, her body soft, molded like warm clay into Marta and their bedsheets.

Fina trembles now like she did then, even as she reaches for Marta and draws her in for deeper kisses.

Marta understands. This space, this refuge, is not safe anymore. Nowhere feels safe anymore. She coaxes Fina onto her back and settles her hips between Fina’s thighs, covering her with the grounding weight of her body. Fina’s arms snake around her, fingernails digging into Marta’s shoulder.

“I love you,” Fina whispers in her ear. “You mean everything to me.”

Instead of responding, Marta kisses down her jaw, down her neck, fingers tangling in the hem of the white nightdress and drawing it up over Fina’s hips. Fina arches up to make space for it to come off over her head, and in the same movement she sits up, ghosting her hands up Marta’s body under the nightgown. Marta shifts her knees to the outside of Fina’s hips as Fina trails fingers up her thighs, curving around her buttocks, along her waist, her ribs, palms ghosting over her breasts, fingers grazing her underarms as she reaches up to guide the fabric up over Marta’s head.

Marta will never tire of the feeling of their nude bodies together, the way she can absorb Fina’s radiant warmth.  She sits in Fina’s lap, and Fina cradles her jaw, then trails her fingers down along the same path they’d taken before: throat, collarbones, breasts, ribs, hips.

“You’re perfect,” Fina whispers. “An artist couldn’t craft a more beautiful woman.”

“This coming from yo—” Marta’s reply dies as Fina’s lips close over her nipple. Her fingers tangle into Fina’s hair, holding her there, and then following when Fina switches to the other side, using gentle teeth and a warm tongue to make Marta arch into her. Fina is so deft with her mouth that Marta doesn’t notice the movement of her fingers until she feels them between her thighs, gently seeking, finding her warm and beginning to open.

But this isn’t right. Marta pulls Fina’s face from her body and urges it to look up at her.  “Lie back, Love. Let me take care of you.”

Fina shakes her head as her fingers slip over Marta’s clitoris, and Marta’s eyes drift closed as her body responds.

“This is what I want,” Fina breathes. She bends forward again and begins to scatter kisses across Marta’s chest and collarbones. She wraps her arm more firmly around Marta’s waist, drawing their torsos closer with her hand fit snugly between them, and if this is Fina’s wish, who is Marta to deny her?

Marta spreads her knees wider, sinks deeper into Fina’s careful hold, sighs when Fina slips inside her. Fina’s hands contain her, hold her entirely between them, so that even the smallest movements of her fingers and Marta’s hips translate from one body to the other, bare friction between their stomachs, Marta’s breasts resting over Fina’s. Marta wraps one arm around Fina’s head, digs the opposite fingertips into Fina’s spine, and buries her nose below Fina’s ear, breathing her skin and shampoo and the sweet, lingering remnants of her morning perfume.

Her body winds slowly, bearing down into Fina’s fingers, hitching against Fina’s thumb. When she’s close, Fina’s hand slides up from her waist, pauses a moment to caress her nipple, then climbs up to cradle her jaw and lift it up, back, until they can look in each other’s eyes.

Marta knows there is nothing more intimate than this: eyes locked, bodies entangled, Fina holding and cradling and caring for her, keeping her together and safe while she slowly dissolves.

“I love you,” Fina breathes, so quietly Marta feels it more than she hears it. Fina’s fingers press and curl, and Marta loses her breath—and again, and again, until she loses herself, her forehead pressed to Fina’s forehead, her hands clutching Fina’s shoulders, her eyes trying to drown themselves in Fina’s sharp, all-encompassing gaze.

Marta collapses into Fina’s body, and Fina holds her, pressing kisses to her shoulder and the side of her neck. Trembling, Marta tries to remember what it was to live without this sensorium, this perfect balance of crisp and smooth, of warm and calm, of Fina’s skin and breath and taste. For long minutes she stays there, cheek buried in the side of Fina’s neck.

Fina’s fingers are still inside her, unmoving now. She turns her head and nudges Marta into a slow, lingering kiss, and for a moment Marta wonders if Fina will start again, right now, without even a moment’s reprieve.

But slowly, she slides her fingers out. Marta hisses, sensitive, and Fina smiles against her lips.

And then they part, and Fina reaches for her nightgown, cast aside on the blankets.

Marta stops herself from saying anything about it. Back when their lovemaking had been confined to hotels, Fina had always insisted they put their nightclothes back on afterward, in case an over-eager housekeeper were to let herself in without knocking. Marta had sometimes wondered what such a housekeeper would make of the way their daytime clothing was often strewn about the room, but it never seemed worthwhile to ask.

Here in their home, though, they have long since dispensed with such nervous formalities. Sleeping skin to skin, wearing nothing but the remains of each other’s pleasure, is one of the greatest, and simplest, joys of Marta’s life.

But she understands: Santiago was here. He found the house, he broke into it, he attacked them here, and if he did, someone else could, too. It is not, it cannot be, the refuge it once was. So Fina puts her clothes back on, and Marta, out of respect for Fina’s comfort, fumbles for her own nightgown and slips it back on, too.

She settles back into her pillow, and Fina props herself up on an elbow, looking down at her. She tucks Marta’s loose hair back away from her face.

“I never could have imagined it was possible to love anyone this much,” Fina says.

Marta kisses Fina’s wandering fingers. “Nor I,” she whispers. “And yet every day, somehow, I manage to love you even more.”

The sadness in Fina’s eyes has not faded. She looks like she is holding back tears, and that, in itself, is distressing. Fina doesn’t hold back her tears when they want to fall. Fina cries when she needs to, just as she laughs or, on rarer occasions, shouts, when the circumstances demand it. And Marta cannot imagine why she would be trying not to cry now, when she so clearly wants to, and when there is nobody here to see it but Marta, who will hold her and caress her and wipe her tears until she has exorcised whatever demon is causing her pain.

Fina kisses her, and then she urges Marta onto her side and folds herself against Marta’s back.

Marta will let Fina have her sadness and her fear tonight. A good night’s sleep helps most things, at least a little bit, and in the morning she will test different strategies to make Fina smile. She will propose a vacation, perhaps, to Barcelona or to Málaga or in the opposite direction, north to Bilbao. Or perhaps to a few of those places, to make for a longer trip. There are stores in all of those cities that she hasn’t visited in some time, and Fina could join her under the guise of supporting a review and liaising with the staff on their procedures and sales histories. And together, they could be far from here, far from Santiago’s rotting corpse, far from the lingering smell of cleaning products in the living room, far from the officers and prison guards who know Fina by name and face, far from the factory workers who still eye Fina with suspicion.

Yes. Tomorrow, that’s what she will propose.

Fina’s fingers trail through Marta’s hair, behind her ear. This feels backward. Marta wants to hold her, to be the one to touch her gently until she sleeps. But when she tries to roll over, Fina stops her.

“Sleep, love,” she whispers. “Let me hold you.”

And what else can she do, if that’s what Fina wants? Marta settles into her pillow, presses her back deeper into Fina’s front, and lets the lingering weight of her orgasm begin to draw her under.

Tonight, she will let Fina have whatever she needs, including her sadness.

Tomorrow, she will help Fina search for her happiness again.

Tomorrow, they will figure out what to do to let their life begin anew.

6. 38

Pelayo comes home late, looking haggard. He has loosened his tie and undone the top button of his shirt. His hair, which usually manages to remain as tidy by evening as it was in the morning, looks as though he’s been running his fingers through it. Marta would almost dare to guess that perhaps he had spent the kind of time with someone that might leave him looking tousled, if it weren’t for the fact that his eyes are red-rimmed and bloodshot.

She is sitting at her vanity, applying moisturizer before bed, when he enters their room, and she pivots immediately to see if his disheveled look is somehow a trick of the mirror. But it is not. “Pelayo! Pelayo, Honey. What happened?”

She doesn’t often use terms of affection with him, nor he with her. But they have chosen each other to be family, and he clearly needs someone to be tender with him right now.

He drops heavily to the foot of the bed, his elbows falling onto his knees, forehead collapsing into one upturned palm. The knot of his tie is already loose, but he tugs at it again as though trying to make space for air through a hangman’s noose.

Marta hastily wipes the excess lotion from her fingers and goes to sit beside him, laying a hand on his back. “Can you tell me what’s wrong?”

He lifts his head, looks at her, and then opens his mouth to speak. But then he closes it again, swallows deeply, and sets his jaw, his eyes seeming to search hers for something, and she wonders what ghosts he might have seen to leave him looking this haunted.

“Pelayo,” she says, putting her other hand on his cheek. “You’re scaring me.”

After another moment, he takes her hand from his cheek and holds it between both of his. “I have to ask you to join me for a press conference tomorrow. Please.”

Marta frowns. She joins him for press engagements regularly, lending the optics of the supportive wife; this is not an especially burdensome request. But normally she has more notice than this, and she cannot, offhand, remember whether she has anything in her schedule that can’t be moved.

“I’ll try, but I’ll have to check my calendar in the mor—”

“Please, Marta,” Pelayo interrupts. “Please. I’m not asking you to be there to play your role for the cameras this time. I’m asking you to be there for me.” He presses one palm to his chest, his other hand still gripping hers tightly. “I need you there, Marta. Please.”

They have known each other long enough, now, for her to be shocked to see him like this, so openly distressed and desperate. She has rarely seen him like this before. She isn’t sure if she has ever seen him like this before.

“What’s going on?” she asks him again.

Pelayo sets his jaw again, and then shakes his head, a silent deferral. “Please,” he says again. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that I have never needed you more in all the time we’ve known each other.”

And then, just as she thinks this conversation couldn’t become more strange and distressing, the unthinkable happens: his eyes well with tears.

She draws him into her arms, against her chest, and he goes without resistance, half-limp, his head tucked under her chin. “All right,” she says. “I’ll be there. I’ll figure it out.”

It’s the least she can do for him, she supposes, after everything he’s done for her.

It’s the least she can do to show up at a press conference when it clearly matters so much to him.

Pelayo refuses to say anything about the press conference for the duration of the drive to the Governor’s Mansion in Toledo. He declines breakfast, taking only a cup of coffee, and spends the entire morning writing and rewriting his statement.

“Would you like me to read it over for you?” Marta asks, as he scribbles away beside her in the car. It’s unusual for him to write his own press statements. He has staff for that.

But he only shakes his head, crosses something out on his page, and keeps writing.

The press conference takes place in the mansion’s press lounge. Marta takes her place off his right shoulder, slightly behind him, when he takes the podium.

The photographer’s flashes surge, then settle.

Then Pelayo starts to speak, and Marta, like the rest of the room, listens.

She manages to keep her spine straight. Her feet hold strong beneath her, her features remain schooled. She keeps her eyes fixed on the back wall of the room and refuses to let them move.

Then, when the press conference ends, she keeps herself upright and strong-shouldered, all the way into the nearest bathroom, and then into the nearest stall.

She doubles over and vomits. Stands, with one hand pressed against the back wall above the toilet, the other hand pressed to her heaving stomach. Then she half folds over and vomits again.

When she finally feels there is nothing left to come up, she flushes, turns, and lets herself out of the stall. This bathroom is accessible to visitors and guests, it’s not one of the private ones in the residential wing, so there is an elderly bathroom attendant waiting there, who offers her a towel dampened at the faucet.

“I understand, Señora,” the old woman says. “It’s repulsive, the things such people do. An aberration in the eyes of God. Thank goodness for your husband’s good work in ensuring the proper consequences, for the safety of all of us, and especially for our children.”

It’s all Marta can do to keep herself from turning back to the stall and vomiting again.

In the privacy of their bedroom in the mansion, Pelayo reaches for her. He sits slouched on the foot of the bed, looking up at her like she holds the only key to some imagined future happiness, but Marta is too agitated to do anything but stand and try not to pace.

“You understand I had no choice, right?” he pleads with her. “Tell me you understand, Marta. Tell me you forgive me, please.”

His face is streaked with tears. A perverse part of her wants to console him, wants to forgive him. He looks so desperate, so grief-ridden, even worse than last night, which was the worst she had ever seen him.

But then she thinks of the eight men captured yesterday, whose arrest he just celebrated from a podium, and who have been sentenced to a fate worse than death. Eight men arrested at raid on a gathering in a private home, from which at least a dozen more escaped—a dozen nameless men whom her husband threatened from the dais today, promising that they would be found, that there would be no safe hiding place until they were brought to trial before God.

He had been quite convincing in his performance of celebrating those eight arrests of men whose only crime had been to love each other.

Marta wonders what they had been doing when the Guardia Civil had stormed into that home on that quiet residential street. Just talking, probably, some of them. Dancing to music from the radio, perhaps. Perhaps some were kissing, or leaning close, exchanging words of intimacy. At least some were probably making love in back rooms—they would have been the ones who were most surely caught, the ones who wouldn’t have been in a position to run quickly at the sound of the door caving in.

She wonders if Pelayo had known any of those men himself. He did not give their names during the press conference—that is the the only kindness he gave them.

“Was Dario among them?” Marta asks.

He drops his face into his hands.

Marta’s heart nearly stops in her chest. “Pelayo—”

“He wasn’t arrested,” Pelayo says, barely audible. “But I think he was among those who fled.”

For a long moment, Marta feels numb. Her nervous energy turns static, an electric vibration through her body that makes her waver on her feet. There is pain in her palm: her fingers have clenched into fists so tight, her nails are carving crescents into her skin.

“Please, Marta,” he begs, reaching, again, for her hand. “Please tell me you forgive me—”

“Ask those men to forgive you,” Marta replies, with an iciness that surprises her, given that she feels like her body is burning itself from the inside out, the taste of bile still acrid on her tongue. “Or take it up directly with God. Call the driver. I’m going home.”

“All right, I’ll come with you—”

“No,” Marta snaps. “You’ll stay here and follow through with this, as your role dictates you must.”

“Marta—”

She leaves the room and goes to the back entrance of the building to await the car.

On the drive, she doesn’t work. She has her diary, but she doesn’t write in it. The chauffeur tries to make friendly small-talk, but quickly understands that she’s not in the mood, and lets her stare out the window in silence. She watches the countryside roll by at first, but as the sky darkens the hills become invisible, until all she can see is the reflection of her own haunted face.

The sun sets early this deep in the winter, and by the time they arrive at her family home, the stars are out. She lets the driver see her go inside, but as soon as he departs, she makes her way back out to where her Volkswagen is parked, and she sets out again.

Cloe lives in a small apartment near Toledo’s city centre, in a historic building that was restored after the war. The first time Marta had visited there, she was surprised by its modesty relative to the de la Reina home, especially when contrasted with their relative power in the business. It is the nicest apartment building in the city, but it is still a small apartment, and it is still Toledo. It has a small kitchen with a table that seats two, a living room with a dining table, two bedrooms, and a modern bathroom. High ceilings, living room windows that are tall and arched but rattle in the wind and offer a view of an unglamorous alleyway. The furnishings feel generic, functional, selected with an aesthetic informed only by a desire not to seem poor or thoroughly outdated. A housekeeper comes through twice a week to clean, but Cloe prepares for herself any meals she doesn’t take in restaurants or at the cantina—though she is not a very good cook, Marta has learned.

“It’s just a little pied-a-terre that Brossard arranged for the job,” Cloe had said, the first time Marta visited her here. “My home is in France. You’ll have to visit sometime.”

Marta arrives unannounced and knocks. Cloe is, to her relief, not yet in nightclothes when she opens the door, despite the evening hour.

Cloe takes one look at Marta’s face—oh, how wretched she must look—and waves her inside. “Tea or cognac?”

Cognac, is Marta’s first instinct, but she will not let this weaken her resolve not to dull her emotions with alcohol anymore. “Tea, thank you."

She takes a seat at the small kitchen table while Cloe fills the kettle and sets it on the stove. Once the flame is lit, Cloe turns, propping her hip against the countertop.

“What’s going on?”

Marta tells her everything.

Tomorrow, Marta’s face will be on the front page of the newspaper, beside her husband’s, above an article that celebrates the decimation of the lives of those eight men, that regrets the escape of the estimated twelve more who fled, that frames those twenty men as the most horrifying kinds of criminals, that celebrates their capture in the name of Franco, of God, of Spanish civilization itself.

By the time she finishes talking, she and Cloe are sitting on opposite sides of the small kitchen table, cups of tea cooling between them. Cloe sips at hers. Marta finds it hard to imagine consuming anything. 

“Tell me you’re as angry as I am,” Marta says.

Cloe huffs out puff of air and shakes her head. She presses her fingertips just above her eyebrows, as she does when she’s trying to contain herself, and Marta sees that those fingers are trembling. “Of course I’m angry. I’m furious. But Marta, what else could we expect from him of as a representative of this country’s government?”

Ah, yes, of course. Cloe’s conviction of Spain’s eternal backwardness never lurks far beneath the surface. Her infinite sense of French superiority grates, just as it always has, even if Marta can concede that France is more progressive in a thousand important ways—this one in particular. But Marta brushes past that irritation for now.

“I expected him to have principles,” Marta says. “I expected him to use his power to make cases like this disappear. God knows he’s pulled strings to have other people set free despite far greater crimes.”

“And yet you expected him to have principles?”

Cloe is looking at her with an infuriating half-smile now, the one that Marta now knows she wears as a mask to conceal her actual emotions. She has wrenched it out of some hidden place and forced it on to conceal anger that Marta had, just a moment before, just barely been able to see. It’s the mask she wears when she overhears people speaking crudely or angrily about her at the factory, or when she has to stare down a furious, ranting Don Damián or Monsieur Brossard or even Marta herself.

“He married you for power even though he knew you could never love him as a man,” Cloe continues, her voice turning prim now. She picks up her teacup and sips from it, forcing a gesture of normalcy. “How could anyone ever trust someone to have power who has so little regard for love?”

Marta’s first instinct is to respond with anger. Pelayo is a good man—he has proven that to her over, over, over again, in the time they’ve known each other. But then she thinks of eight men in the cells downtown—one of them probably inhabiting the same cell Fina did, sleeping on the same lumpy cot, being tortured by the sound of the same dripping sink. And hopefully not by anything worse, her brain adds, unhelpfully. She had come here, to Cloe, hoping to be validated in the torture of her own conflicted emotions. She had wanted Cloe to rage with her, and then to help her figure out what to do about it.

But that’s not Cloe. Cloe does not rage. Cloe offers up the things she cannot control, and she navigates the rest with the precision and quiet aggression of a hungry shark.

Marta looks at her teacup and wishes she had opted for the cognac instead. “You have a great deal of power over everyone at the factory, and yet you live without love.” It is an infantile, petty retort, the kind of thing a child might say to deflect the injury of insult, I know you are, but what am I?

Cloe’s lips twitch, a rare crack in that half-smiling mask. “Do I?”

And Marta, feeling raw and tired and irritated for not having received the kind of response from Cloe that she’d hoped for, doubles down. “Do you what? Have power, or live a loveless life?”

Cloe looks down, at the cup in her hands, her mouth softening entirely for just a half a second before she blows over its rim. It’s a performance. The tea has long been cool enough to drink.

“And you?” she says quietly. “What love do you have that undergirds the power you hold, Marta?”

Marta thinks of Fina, of how readily Fina would call her out for the unfair exercise of her influence. Fina, who knew what it felt like to be vulnerable to the whims and impulses of people born into positions of authority. Fina, who knew what it felt like to fear that an error that might be disgraceful for a powerful person could make a difference of life and death for her and the people closest to her—an accidental pregnancy, an affair with the wrong person, a misstep at work. When Marta had had Fina, she had felt safer in her own exercise of power, because she had trusted that Fina would tell her if she was wielding it like a despot. And she loved Fina too much to ever ignore what she had to say, even if it was something she didn’t want to hear.

“You’re thinking about her,” Cloe says.

Marta closes her eyes, but does not reply. Of course she’s thinking about Fina. Who else can she think about, when she is asked about love?

There is warmth on Marta’s wrist where it rests on the table. She looks down: Cloe’s hand, warm from her teacup, curling over Marta’s pulse, fingers tucking into the hollow of her palm.

“I’m sorry.” Marta's eyes rest on Cloe’s fingers. “I was unkind to you just now, and unfair. I was misplacing my anger onto you. I didn't mean that.”

Cloe squeezes Marta's wrist: a silent acknowledgement and acceptance of the apology.

“What would she have said about this?” Cloe asks.

“Oh, she would have raged,” Marta says, unable to keep herself from smiling at the thought—the first smile she’s managed to dredge up since Pelayo opened his mouth on that stage. “She would have found some excuse to corner him somewhere and she would have torn into him for his hypocrisy and self-loathing, and—”

Too late, Marta realizes what she has said. While Cloe knows about her, of course—it would be hard not to, given the nights they’ve shared a bed—Marta has never told her about Pelayo. Her eyes dart over to Cloe’s, but Cloe’s expression doesn’t change. 

“I guessed some time ago,” Cloe says.

“You can’t say anything.”

“I wouldn’t. I would never dream of sentencing him to the same fate he gave those eight men today,” she says, voice dripping with disdain.

Marta isn’t satisfied. “If the press or the law found out about him, it would endanger me as much as him. You understand that, right?”

“Of course, for goodness’ sake.” Cloe releases Marta’s wrist and brings both hands back to her teacup. “I’m glad that your Fina left when she did, though. Because there’s no way he would have let her stick around this long, if you loved her as much as it seemed you did, and if she was really as direct and assertive as you say.”

Marta shakes her head. “He knew what he was getting into with her, with us, when he asked to marry me. He supported her, created professional opportunities. They butted heads sometimes, yes, but they respected each other.”

“Respected?” Cloe laughs, then seems to regret it, schooling her features back to something more neutral. She shakes her head. “Do you think the man who did what he did today has the capacity for mutual respect? Pelayo sold his soul to the devil long ago, Marta, he wouldn’t have hesitated to sell your girlfriend if she was getting on his nerves, let alone getting in his way.” She meets Marta's gaze with a direct, shameless look, the one that has the power to make Marta feel like she's standing in an x-ray machine having pictures taken of her bones. “Sometimes I can’t help but think he’ll sell you too, if it becomes expedient and you’re not careful.”

Marta sets her jaw, biting back the impulse to snap out a correction: She wasn’t my girlfriend, she was my wife. That isn’t the point right now. It’s not that she’s never imagined exactly what Cloe has just said. It’s not as though it has never crossed her mind. It’s not as though she has never been strangely puzzled by the mimicry of normal marriage that Pelayo has insisted upon, even in private, though she has never fought it—it had been an easy role to fall back into, a role she had played for over a decade with Jaime, made easier by the removal of the burden of undesired sexual intimacy.

And yet.

Cloe sets her teacup in its saucer with the hollow rattle that indicates that it’s empty. Marta’s own cup is still mostly full. But Cloe stands and offers her an outstretched hand.

“Come,” Cloe says. “It’s late. Stay here with me tonight.”

Marta blinks up at her, finding her eyes unable to focus.

He wouldn’t have hesitated to sell your girlfriend if she was getting on his nerves, let alone getting in his way.

She has thought it before, when she was irritated with him or tired of playing the Governor’s trophy wife. But now, having discovered just how far Pelayo is willing to fall in service of power and politics, something about it makes her brain itch.

“Not tonight,” Marta says, standing slowly. “I think I need to be alone.”

Cloe frowns. “I don’t like the idea of leaving you alone right now. Stay. You can sleep in the guest room if you need space.”

Marta shakes her head. “I’ll be fine, I promise.”

“Will you tell me where you’re going, at least?”

Marta goes to the front door and retrieves her coat from the hook. “I think I want to go to my cottage in the hills.”

Cloe follows her toward the entryway, but her footsteps stutter at that. “You have a cottage in the hills?”

“I haven’t been there in a long time,” Marta says, as she fishes her gloves from her handbag and puts them on. “But I think that’s where I want to go now.”

For a few weeks after Fina’s departure, Marta would return to their house to tidy, dust, keep it welcoming. When Fina came home, Marta reasoned, the house should be ready for her, as though she had never left it. But as time passed, the house came to feel less like a home and more like an urn containing the ashes of her lost happiness, in addition to the casket containing the corpse of their greatest sin.

So she stopped coming.

She and Fina maintained the place on their own. They did not hire staff to clean for them, because neither of them wanted to feel like Fina had to hide her things away where nobody could see them—not here, in this house that was supposed to be a home for her, too.

When Marta enters and turns on the lights, she is surprised to see that someone has covered the furniture with dust sheets, and her first instinct is to be afraid: who has visited this house without her permission, or her knowledge?

But there is a note on the covered coffee table, held down by a dusty bottle of wine. Marta picks it up.

I know you haven’t been coming here so I thought I’d close the place up for you. That way, if you ever come back, everything will be in good condition for you under the covers. I borrowed a key from Pelayo. We agreed it would be best not to say anything to you unless you mentioned wanting to come back. I love you dearly, sister of my heart. -Begoña

The note, like the wine bottle and the white sheets over everything, is dust-covered, but Marta clutches it to her chest. How long ago had Begoña been here? Marta thinks of her, of everything she’s been through with Gabriel and Jesús and Andres, and tries to remember if she’s ever done anything half as kind as this for her.

She makes her way to the kitchen. Sure enough, the refrigerator has been emptied and cleaned, the wastebasket emptied.

She wanders to the bedroom.

The shape of their bed is outlined under the folds of the white sheet. Marta thinks, strangely, of a child dressed up in a ghost costume, but when she pulls the cover off it’s the sight of the bed itself that surges at Marta like a haunting. Begoña has stripped the sheets, and she has folded the blankets neatly in the centre of the mattress, alongside the stacked pillows. The pillows look new, because, Marta supposes, they effectively are for how briefly they were used. She and Fina had hoped to live here, but then Santiago, and then Pelayo—

The thought both of them sends a thrill of revulsion up her spine, violent enough that she shakes with it.

She goes to the wardrobe. It is still full. There are outfits here she had forgotten she owned. Perhaps she should bring them back to the house with her. She wonders if anyone will notice if they see her wearing a skirt set she hasn’t worn in such a long time.

Fina’s half of the wardrobe is full too: the persistent mystery that has dogged Marta since Fina’s sudden departure. Marta slips one of Fina’s cardigans off a hanger. It’s the red one that Marta associates with chilly mornings, Fina wearing a house dress under that cardigan making coffee, Marta stepping up behind her and wrapping her arms around Fina’s waist and pressing her lips to the sweater’s thick knit on her shoulder, then just where it curls up the base of her neck. Steam curling up from the kettle, the kitchen window fogged over. Good morning, Beautiful, Marta would breathe into her skin.  

Marta slips the sweater on. It had fit loosely on Fina; it hangs off Marta’s shoulders as though she were a scarecrow. She tugs the cuffs over her hands and lifts them to her face: lingering Anhelos, and the trace of the hand soap they keep by the kitchen and bathroom sinks. Marta has, for the most part, learned to live with her grief over Fina’s sudden disappearance; she has made her peace with the knowledge that she will never fully understand why she left, and she has learned to tame the panic that still arises, sometimes, when she lets herself remember that she doesn’t know where Fina is, if she’s happy, if she’s safe, if she’s alive.

It's the grief, not the panic, that arises now, when Marta envelops herself in Fina’s clothes and her presence and her memory. She is grateful that Fina isn’t here to see what Marta allowed herself to be party to, this morning. If she ever does see Fina again, she wonders if she will be able to look her in the eye.

But Fina could have been arrested in a raid just like that one. Fina could be in prison somewhere, or in a labour camp. Anything could have happened to her. Anything.

Marta pulls the sweater tighter around herself and goes back to the bed. With one hand she holds the sweater closed, with the other she tosses a pillow toward the headboard and shakes out the folded blanket. She kicks off her shoes and lays down on the bare mattress, lays her head on the uncovered pillow, and draws the blanket over herself, still dressed in her clothes from the day, Fina’s sweater wrapped tight around her in the place of the only hug that Marta thinks could make her feel better.

Tell me what to do, Fina, Marta begs the echoes of her memories. I feel like you would know what I should do.

There are men in Toledo who must sleeping just like this, right now, clinging to clothing and bedsheets that smell like lovers they may never see again. Women, too, probably, who may know or not know the truth about their husbands, but who love them, and suddenly find themselves alone, knowing or not knowing why, steeped in shame or grief or fear.

Dario, Marta thinks, suddenly. Tomorrow she will speak to Dario. She will find out who these men are, their names, if they have families. There is likely nothing she can do for them, but she can, at least, know who they are to hold in her heart, know what names she can utter over candles and prayers. If she was used to help present them as monsters, the least she can do, herself, is to learn them as people.

Tomorrow, that is what she will do.

Chapter Text

Marta sleeps fitfully, exhaustion forcing her under, anxiety and resurgent grief doing their best to drag her back up again. The settling-in of the morning chill is what finally forces her into wakefulness. This time of year, the foggy cold would see her burrowing into Fina’s side of the blankets, seeking to share her dome of warmth. And Fina, half-awakened by Marta’s encroachment, would lazily lift an arm to make space for her, fold herself and the warm blanket around Marta’s body, and be fully asleep again without ever having realized she’d stirred. And on rare mornings where they had nowhere to be, Marta would let herself doze off again, lulled by the warmth and the feeling of Fina’s skin against hers, Fina’s breath on the back of her neck.

Of course, there is no Fina here now. Marta is lying under just one quilt, not the layers of blankets they would normally use in this season, and Fina’s cardigan is not enough to ward off the damp bite that seeps through the walls.

Time to get up, then.

In the bathroom, she opens the faucet and lets it run long enough for the stale water to drain from the pipes. The boiler remembers its job well enough to let Marta take a shower, and then she realizes she will indeed have to revive at least one long-forgotten outfit from the wardrobe because the outfit she slept in is hopelessly rumpled and she has not brought anything else with her.

She winds her dirty clothes into a bundle to bring back to the house for cleaning, and then takes Fina’s red cardigan in her hands. It’s a foolish thing to want to press it to her face again, like she did last night, to inhale whatever is left of Fina there, the lone strands of hair that cling to the fabric or the remnants of perfume at the collar.

But when Marta leaves this house, she will enter a world where the morning newspaper has been delivered, her picture on the front page beside Pelayo, bearing witness to his hypocrisy and her complicity and the horrific farce that is their combined ascent to power.

She indulges in a moment with the sweater, pressing it over her nose and mouth. Then she returns it to the wardrobe, to hang among the rest of the clothing Fina left behind, and makes her way out to the car.

Marta is relieved to find that Pelayo must have stayed the night at the Governor’s residence, because he has not been home. It’s easy enough to find Dario’s home and office phone numbers in the address book in Pelayo’s nightstand, but when she goes to the living room to make the call, she can hear before lifting the receiver that her father is already on the line in his office.

Well, then. To the factory, she supposes.

Cloe is in their office already, working at her desk, so Marta prepares to adopt a professional tone, as though trying to arrange a business meeting.

She tries the home number first, but there is no answer. So he has gone to work, then, despite everything, keeping up appearances. Marta understands: it’s what she would have done, what she has done when confronted with shattering grief, until she found that work was a charade she could no longer maintain.

His office number connects her with a secretary who forwards her call to Dario himself.

“Dario,” she says. “It’s Marta de la Reina. I was hoping to speak to you.”

He is quiet for a long, long moment.

“Speak to me,” he repeats. “About what?”

It is her turn to pause for several breaths. “I think you know about what.”

She hears him exhale into the receiver. “Are you calling for him? Did he ask you to—”

“No,” Marta says, with enough emphasis that Cloe’s eyes leap up from her desk to look at her. Marta clears her throat and shifts, turning her face away from Cloe’s prying gaze. “He doesn’t know I’m calling.”

So much for trying to fake a business call.

He is silent again. Marta can imagine him sitting at a desk, pressing the tips of his fingers into his brow, massaging away a headache, before he finally speaks.

“Not like this, not here. Could I—” He clears his throat, starts again. “Could I trouble you to meet me in Madrid? I would offer to meet you in Toledo, but given recent events—”

“Of course, I understand,” Marta says. “Yes, I can come to Madrid. What time?”

He says that he can take the afternoon off, and they agree that she will join him for a late lunch at his home.

When she hangs up, Cloe looks at her with a cocked eyebrow, a silent question. Marta shakes her head. Cloe lets it go.

Marta manages to make some use of the two hours she has at the office before she leaves. Cloe is happy enough not to raise the subject from the previous day. Normally, Marta might go and check on the girls at the store, but she suspects they will have seen the paper, and anticipates that Claudia will look at her with that confused, disappointed puppy look (which Marta can handle) and Carmen will pin her with a glare that leaves no doubt as to her sense of Marta’s hypocrisy (which will be harder for Marta to take).

When it’s time to leave, Marta rises and takes her coat from the hook.

“I have to go to Madrid,” Marta says to Cloe.

Cloe looks up. “All right.”

“Do me a favour. If Pelayo calls looking for me, tell him you sent me on business, would you?”

“To Madrid?”

“Madrid, Paris, the moon, wherever. Just away. I’ll be back later this evening.”

Cloe lays her pencil down and steeples her fingers below her chin. “All right. Can you tell me what’s going on?”

Marta sets her jaw. She knows Cloe well enough to know that she gathers information like a crow gathers trinkets, hoarded in case of some future usefulness, but her respect for Marta and the nature of their relationship has caused her to exercise more reticence when it comes to inquiries that might seem invasive. So she wouldn’t ask, normally. But she knows what happened yesterday. And Marta is not sure whether she should confirm that, yes, she is following up on the aftermath.

Cloe reads Marta’s silence for the reluctance it is. “Marta, I will lie to your husband for you six times a day if you ask me to, you know that I truly don’t care about that. I just want to know if you’re about to do something dangerous.”

“A little, yes,” Marta says, because for the wife of Toledo’s Governor to visit a man who escaped an indecency arrest two days ago is not without risk. “But no more dangerous than, say, choosing to spend a night with you.”

Cloe’s eyes widen, and Marta realizes how that probably sounded. “It’s not a woman,” she says, more quietly. “I promise you that.”

“Okay,” Cloe replies. She slips a hand under her hair and palms the back of her neck, a gesture that Marta has come to recognize as one of her nervous tics. “Well, do me a favour and stop by when you get home, would you? Or at least call me, so I know you’re back safe.”

That much, Marta can do. She nods and heads out.

Dario lives in an apartment in La Latina. When he opens the door he is well-dressed, presumably from his morning at work, but Marta can immediately see the weight of fear and exhaustion in his eyes. She had worn a similar look, she knows, when Fina was imprisoned, and even worse after Fina left.

He shows her into his comfortable living room. The furniture is not new, but it is nice, and the space feels pleasantly lived-in; it reminds her more of her home with Fina than any other home she spends time in these days.  He has set out a tray on the sideboard with bocadillos, cheese, olives, and pastries.

As Marta enters, she sees a copy of El País laid out on one of the end tables by the sofa. The photo from Pelayo’s news conference doesn’t appear above the fold on the front page, much to Marta’s relief, but it is not surprising that the Madrid papers would not so prominently feature a story local to Toledo. And there, yes, a headline that starts in the left column above the fold and disappears below: Raid on Toledo Den of Iniquity Results In—

Dario watches her notice the paper, then catches her eyes as they rise up again.

“I picked up the luncheon from a restaurant down the street,” he says, and she can tell that he is emphasizing that which he is not saying. “Normally I enjoy preparing food for guests, but today—"

Before she can let herself think better of it, Marta crosses the room and puts her arms around him, and his voice cuts off.

For a moment he doesn’t respond, his body remaining stiff.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, close to his ear. “I am so, so sorry.”

He stands for another breath, and another, his shoulders feeling so tense they could snap under their own strain. And then he softens, wilting, his arms coming loosely around her waist, his forehead dropping to her shoulder.

They stand like that, still and quiet in a shared grief that Marta knows is infinitely more acute for him than for her. She brings her hand to the back of his neck, palm on his warm skin, and feels him sigh. It must be a rare thing for someone like him—a man, living alone, with his family all far away in Malaga—to be touched like this, to be held in comfort by someone who wants nothing from him. Society’s unwritten scripts permit women to touch each other for comfort and affection without the assumption of prurience or scandal; Marta has more than once sought comfort in an embrace from Begoña or even, on occasion, from Carmen or Claudia. And still, when Fina had left and Marta had shattered, when she had been fighting desperately with herself over whether to keep herself together or to let herself go to pieces, it had taken weeks, longer, before anyone had offered her touch in consolation. Pelayo had been angry with her for her suffering; Digna and Carmen had been navigating their own grief; Begoña and Andrés had been struggling through their own challenges. And it had been Julia, in the end, who had wrapped her arms around Marta’s waist and promised to be there for her, and it had taken all of Marta’s resolve to keep herself from terrifying the poor child by breaking down in her arms.

It had taken weeks for anyone to hug her, though it would have cost so little for so many people to do it. She had been too broken to know how to ask.

But for a man with no family around, there would have been no-one to provide the comfort of touch except, of course, in spaces of secrecy and danger where he would dare not go now. The stakes for someone to hold Dario, to wrap their arms around him and offer him comfort, are so much higher.

She holds him tighter.

Marta has already decided she will not ask his forgiveness. Just as she could not give it to Pelayo, she cannot ask Dario to give it to her. But if she can, in this moment, make him feel less alone, she will at least know that she was able to release some small amount of caring into the void of loveless nihilism around which both of their lives have been thrust into uncertain orbit.

He removes an arm from her waist and brings it to his eyes, and Marta takes the invitation to step back.

“So it’s true,” she says, keeping a hand on his elbow. He looks at it, then at her, then down at the ground. “It’s true. You were there.”

He nods, resigned, and passes his hand over his forehead, smoothing his hair back. Then he offers a tired, stunned little laugh. “Do you want to hear something ridiculous?” 

Marta smiles. “Of course.”

“I moved to Madrid when I heard he was going to become Governor of Toledo.”

This is not, in itself, ridiculous. She remembers hearing about the move from Pelayo, who had mentioned it with equal parts affection and frustration. Marta waits.

“I work in public service,” Dario continues. “I thought, perhaps, if I could be useful to him…” he trails off and shakes his head, blushing a little in sad embarrassment. “It became obvious quickly that he wasn’t interested in taking advantage of that connection. But I stayed anyways, because I thought—well—”

He presses his fingertips to his eyes again. Marta touches his elbow once more, saying nothing.

“It was close to Toledo, and I thought spending time with men in Toledo would be safer,” he finishes, his voice breaking. “I thought he would keep us safe.”

“So did I,” Marta says, and that gets Dario’s attention. His eyes rise up to hers. “Two days ago I would have thought the same, Dario,” she says. “I didn’t know. I learned what had happened while I was standing on that stage with him during the press conference. He refused to tell me in advance. I suppose he knew that if I had known, I never would have agreed to stand with him.”

Dario exhales, eyes watering again. “So he’s not going to do anything for them, then.”

Marta lets her hand fall. She has not asked Pelayo, technically. But she knows.

“I don’t think so, no.”

“And—and the rest of us?”

She pauses for a moment. Pelayo will not help the people arrested, but whether he may try to call off the hunt for the remainder—that, she does not know.

“I’ll ask him when I see him next. But he’s afraid, Dario. He has always been afraid. You know that.”

He nods. Breathes once, twice. “Excuse me.” Then he turns his back to her and walks three steps away, until he can put his palm on the frame of the door that goes into his dining room. She gives him his space, watches his shoulders move with his breath.

Finally, he turns back. “Well,” he says with forced levity, “I promised you lunch.”

The tension in his smile, the dullness of his eyes, make her heart clench, but she lets him have the shield of his façade. She isn’t terribly hungry. It doesn’t seem like he is, either. But the food looks lovely, so she assembles a few items onto a plate and takes it with her to the sofa. Dario does the same. They sit side by side and say nothing for as long as it takes Marta to eat one of the lovely little bocadillos with ham.

“So what will you do?” she asks him, eventually. “If there’s any way I can help, I will.”

“I’m not sure,” he says. “I’ve thought for a long time about making my way to France. Maybe this is the sign I’ve been waiting for.”

“My family’s business is now half-owned by a French company. If you’d like, I’ll see if I can make some connections for you.”

“That’s kind of you, Marta. Thank you.”

They sit quietly. Marta eats an olive.

She shifts on the sofa, turning to better face him. “May I ask a presumptuous question?”

He shrugs and offers a nod of assent.

“Do you… have someone, these days?”

A dry laugh forces itself from his lungs, against resistance. He looks down at the carpet and shakes his head. “I’ve had dalliances. Company to pass the time, you know. But even though I’ve long known it was futile, I’ve never figured out how to want more from anyone but him.”

Marta’s heart goes out to him just that little bit more. “I know that feeling well.”

She expects him to dismiss that as a platitude, but he looks up and frowns at her, and something in his body seems to change. “How is Fina?” he asks, but there’s a strange lilt to his voice. There is something he wants to know, Marta can tell, and the question is meaningful in getting to it, but what he’s after lies not in the answer.

“I don’t know. She left me some time ago,” she says quietly, looking down at her hands. She laughs sadly. “And like you, I haven’t figured out how to want anyone else, not really.”

This time it’s she who expects a platitude from him, a generic statement of condolences. But instead she hears a sharp intake of breath.

“Where did she go?” he asks, a strange waver in his voice, and again, it feels like the information he seeks is not in the answer to the question. And it is a strange question: why would he assume she had gone anywhere, apart from simply away from her relationship with Marta?

She eyes him now, looking for the meaning hidden under his words. When she speaks, she speaks slowly, carefully, watching him all the while. “I don’t know where she went. She never told me.”

Abruptly Dario stands. He walks to the sideboard and Marta thinks he intends to pour them both a drink, but instead he pauses there with his back to her, his fingers resting on the polished oak, head bowed down.

She rises to her feet. “Dario? Are you all right?”

He straightens. Then he turns, and his eyes have taken on the stunned, muted air of someone who has been visited by an apparition that has shown him all his sins.

“Do you like tawny port?” he asks.

Marta blinks at him, surprised at the non sequitur. She opts for honesty in her response. It feels like she owes him honesty today. “I do, but I’ve learned—I discovered after Fina left that it’s best for me not to drink alcohol when I’ve been dealing with things that upset me. So perhaps not right now. But thank you.”

He nods, the gesture framed with an unexpected resolve. “Do you mind if I have a glass?”

“Not at all.”

“All right. I’m going to pour one for myself, and I’ll pour you a glass of water. And then I’m going to tell you something I should have told you a long time ago.”

Marta doesn’t know why, but her heart rate begins to rise.

Dario walks back to the sideboard, and for a moment there is no sound but the sounds of glassware clinking, a bottle opening. Marta watches him work, still wondering about his abrupt change in tone, as he fills a small dessert glass with port for himself, and then pours a larger glass of water for her from a pitcher there. They sit side-by-side on the sofa again.

“The kindness of your visit means—” he coughs, and then he sets his jaw, and Marta can see how hard he is working to hold himself together. “It means a lot to me.” His voice cracks. He clears his throat, inhales, and continues. “My other friends, the ones from Toledo, none of us would risk calling each other right now, let alone trying to see one another. My friends in Madrid, too—everyone is keeping quiet. And nobody else knows or understands. So until I got your call, I felt so very, very alone.”

Her heart breaks for him all over again. “Dario—”

He holds up a hand to cut her off. “Wait. Because, you see, you’re being so very kind, and I do not deserve this kindness from you.”

At that, Marta frowns. They are not close, she supposes; and it was a long drive for her to come up here, and will be a long drive home in the evening. But she stood by Pelayo yesterday. Visiting Dario has not been a burden. This is truly the least she could do.

Dario takes a sip of his wine and licks the residue off his lip, and then sets his glass down on the end table. He spreads his fingers wide over his knees, steeling himself. “Some months ago, I agreed to help Pelayo with something that I regretted from the moment I could see the full picture of it,” he says. “I shouldn’t have agreed to do it, but I did. And then after I did, I should have told you about it. But I didn’t. And I will regret that for the rest of my life.”

“For goodness’ sake, Dario,” Marta says. She can feel her heartbeat surging, her blood pressure making the skin of her arms feel too tight. “What are you on about?”

She knows.

Before he can utter the word, she knows.

She sets her glass down on the table because if it is in her hand when he speaks, she knows she will drop it.

“Fina,” he says.

It’s the word she expected to hear, and still, she wishes she had kept the glass in her hand. Dropping it might have helped. The air is gone from her lungs. Her mind goes blank, hollow.

Her pulse throbs in her ears.

Dario helped Pelayo do something.

Something to do with Fina.

“What—what did he—what did you—” She can’t find the language. It doesn’t exist. “Tell me what happened, Dario—if he hurt her—if you hurt her—” She can’t finish a thought, a sentence, barely a word. Her heart is outpacing her breath; she feels dizzy.

Dario holds up his hands in a calming gesture. It makes her want to punch him, which he seems to realize, and quickly lowers his hands to his lap again. “She was fine when I last saw her, and as far as I know she’s still fine. But please, Marta. Please, will you let me start at the beginning?”

Marta sits back. She eyes his glass of port on the table and wants to use it to ruin his beautiful Persian rug, but doesn’t. “First tell me where she is. And then, yes, you’d better start at the beginning.”

Dario takes a deep breath and nods. “I guess I don’t know where she is now. But I left her in Buenos Aires.”

For the second time in two days, Marta wants to vomit. “Buenos Aires,” she echoes, her eyes going unfocused, the syllables sounding like nonsense, her mind failing to register them.

But register they do. Her gaze finds his again. “Buenos Aires,” she repeats. “The woman had never gone further than Madrid, and you’re telling me you were with her in fucking Argentina?”

Dario nods helplessly. “Pelayo and I have an old friend there – a man who went to school with us.”

“When? When in God’s name was this?”

“When I met up with her at the airport in Madrid, she had spent the previous night with you.”

The very beginning, then. Marta reels.

Pelayo has been lying to her from the start.

Her mind’s first attempt to make Dario’s words make sense had been to think that perhaps Fina had left on her own, as her letter said, and somehow had connected with Dario later, because she needed help or as a solution to some kind of problem, and perhaps had asked that Marta not be told—perhaps because she, unlike Marta, had allowed her heart to move on.

But no. Fina left Marta’s bed, Marta’s life, and was met a few hours later by Dario in a different city at an airport, to board a plane.

All of it orchestrated by Pelayo.

Pelayo had known Fina would be leaving before she left.

Pelayo has been lying to Marta baldly, unapologetically, for months. He has berated her grief, belittled her suffering, and—perhaps the most offensive—he has soothed her, claimed to care for her, performed the empathetic husband when she felt she was going to shatter into pieces.

He could have alleviated her suffering in an instant, if he had actually cared.

She forces herself to blink, corralling her spiralling thoughts before they spin her to pieces. “Start at the beginning. I need to know exactly what happened. All of it.”

Dario takes another sip of his port, and then he takes a breath, and he begins.

“Pelayo called me and asked for a favour. You and Fina had been behaving recklessly, he said. You were going to get yourselves into trouble, ruining both his life and your own. You lived without tact, he said, always flirting with the edge of openness; the entire family and half the factory knew about you. And so, to resolve the problem, Pelayo told me he paid Fina off.”

Marta gasps, but Dario raises a hand, wordlessly asking her to wait before speaking.

“He said he offered her a life-changing sum of money and the promise to jump-start her photography career into something greater than it could ever become while she was working as a shop assistant in Toledo. He promised her fame and fortune, but only if she agreed to leave you and move to Argentina. And he said that she was easily wooed by the promise of money and opportunity; she agreed without much fuss. But he needed someone to escort her safely to Argentina—‘To get her settled,’ he said, but even then I could tell that he really wanted to make sure she went as she had promised she would. And he asked if I would do it.”

Marta shakes her head. “This doesn’t make sense. Fina was already making a name for herself as a photographer here. And has never cared about money. My God, when I told her I wanted to put her in my will, she—”

Dario dips his head, a sad confession. “I know that now.  But I believed him. I saw no reason not to. And to be honest, I was angry at her for it. I remembered your devotion to her, the look in your eyes when you told me you would give up everything for her in a moment. That she would be willing to sell something so beautiful for cash and professional opportunities—I couldn’t understand it. My God, if anyone loved me the way you loved her, and if I loved that person back the way I thought she loved you, there’s not a thing anyone could do to make me give that up. Not a thing.”

His eyes well up again. Part of Marta wants to comfort him, but she is suddenly very, very tired of gifting the men around her with the labour of her emotions. So, instead, she waits for him to go on.

“I assumed she must just not have loved you as well as I’d thought she did. And if that were the case, I thought, then yes, I would escort her to Argentina. I would take her away from you, because someone so willing to sell your love didn’t deserve to have it.”

Marta sets her jaw. It insults her, this performance of caring, when it appears he played a central role in the decimation of the only happiness she has ever truly known.

Dario continues. “When I received Fina at the airport, I expected to see a woman at least moderately excited for her upcoming adventures, a fat wallet in her pocket and her dreams on the horizon. But she looked like she hadn’t slept; she hadn’t applied fresh makeup and her hair was hastily tied back in a ponytail. For a transatlantic flight, I thought she could have made a bit more effort. And when she laid eyes on me, her look of betrayal struck me like a blow. I should have known, then, that things were not as they had seemed, or as I had been told. But I was already tired, having travelled up from Malaga on such short notice, and I assumed she was tired too—"

“And emotional, as women are?” Marta asks drily.

Dario doesn’t take the bait. “I assumed she was tired,” he says again, “and perhaps scared, and sad for what she was leaving behind even if she had deemed the sacrifice worthwhile. I tried to make friendly conversation with her as we waited in line for check-in and then again for boarding, but she provided answers that bordered on monosyllabic, a far cry from the warm, friendly woman she had been when we met before. And then, in our seats, she immediately unfolded the blanket provided, turned toward the window, and pretended to sleep. She declined food and drink, and she declined to disembark when the plane made its refueling stop in the Canary Islands. I grew frustrated with her, then, because if she wouldn’t disembark then I couldn’t either. I had a responsibility for her safety, after all, that was why Pelayo had sent me with her. She didn’t care.

“Over the Atlantic, I tried to convince her to eat something when the flight attendants came around with an evening meal. She declined again, and by this point I thought her a petulant child for the way she was behaving. I regretted agreeing to bring her,” he says. “I wondered what I had ever seen in her—or what you had ever seen in someone so immature.”

Marta sets her jaw, biting down the instinct to leap to Fina’s defense. Her irritation is not the point right now. Fina is the point.

“My nerves ran out, after so many hours of travel already, and so many more to go,” Dario continues. “I snapped at her, saying that if she had chosen this future there was no reason for her to be such poor company along the way. And, Marta, she laughed at me. This horrible, broken, angry laugh. Chose this? She said to me. Is that what he told you: that I chose this?”

Marta’s stomach twists with a horrifying foreboding.

Dario forces himself to hold her eyes. “Only then, for the first time, did it occur to me that Pelayo’s story behind this trip may not have been the truth.  Didn't you? I asked her. And she made a sound at me, something between a laugh and a sob. No, she said. My God, no. You think I would choose to give up my friends, the only home I’ve ever known—that I would walk away from Marta?

“Well, you did, didn’t you? I said, still frustrated.

“Something in her face changed. I think that was the moment she realized that I didn’t know the truth—that if I was hurting her, it was because I didn’t know I was doing it. She sat up and leaned toward me. Quietly, she said: He blackmailed me, Dario. Didn’t he at least have the spine to tell you that?”

Marta’s world tilts on its axis.

Her heart pounds. Her mind races.

“No,” she says, but the sound feels disconnected from her body, as though a ghost were speaking on her behalf. “No. Not Pelayo—he wouldn’t, he—”

“He did, Marta.” Dario leans toward her, arm outstretched. He hesitates for a moment before he put his hand on her elbow, a twisted parody of the way she had touched him just a few minutes earlier. “He did, and I helped him. And I’m—I’m sorry.”

She wrenches her elbow out of his grasp, and he pulls his hand back as though he’s been burned.

“I tried to fix it,” he says, his tone turning pleading. “That much I swear to you. When she told me he had blackmailed her, I told her we would disembark the moment we landed in Rio de Janeiro, that I would change my return ticket and between us we would buy one for her, that we would go right back to Spain. I told her I would send a telegram to Eduardo and Palomba in Buenos Aires asking them to lie to Pelayo for us and telling them why, and I would find a way to keep her safe from whatever Pelayo held over her until we could fix this. And above all, I would contact you, in secrecy, somehow, I would contact you to let you know what had happened, and that she was safe, and that—” his voice breaks. His eyes are red, he is crying now, this burden an unbearable one on top of everything else in the past two days. “That she had never wanted to leave you,” he says, his voice sinking into a whisper. “She was a wreck on that plane because only half of her was there, Marta. She had left the other half in Toledo with you.”

Marta feels outside of herself. Vaguely, distantly, she wonders if she will remember this conversation tomorrow. She reaches for her water glass. Sips from it. Sets it down again. It is as though her body is protecting itself by shutting down her awareness, her humanity, and reducing her to an automaton.

“But you didn’t bring her back,” Marta says.

Dario shakes his head helplessly, and shrugs. “She refused. Passionately, she refused, because she said…” He sniffs, crying openly now. “She said he had threatened you, too, if she didn’t go. And she wasn’t willing to take that risk.”

Marta surges to her feet. She turns her back on Dario, walks around the end of the couch and crosses the floor to the window. It’s growing dark outside. She braces one palm on the window trim, presses the other to her stomach, feeling the movement of her own breath. The dress she is wearing, the one from the mountain house, is one she hasn’t worn since Fina left, dark blue with white flecks and a white shawl collar. Standing here, now, she can feel Fina’s hands on the buttons, feel Fina’s fingers tugging at the neckline. In the window, she sees her reflection as much as the world outside, and doesn’t know how to recognize herself.

Two days before Fina left, they had killed Santiago after he attacked them in their home. But what could Pelayo have done with that? He could have threatened to tell the authorities about the body in the back yard, but nothing good could have come from that. He would have had as much to lose from Santiago’s discovery as they would have.

“What was he blackmailing her with?” she asks Dario, in the reflection.

“I don’t know.”

She pivots on her heel and stares at him. He has followed her with his eyes, sitting now with his elbow hooked over the back of the sofa, watching her. “It can’t just be our relationship,” she goes on, “he has as much to lose as we do if that gets out. We didn’t exchange letters that he could steal. There had to be something else.”

“She wouldn’t tell me, Marta,” Dario replies. “She was angry, and to be honest, I think she was ashamed, perhaps. Whatever it was, it wasn’t something she wanted me to know about. And I thought the least I could do was respect her when she was so adamant.”

He is desperate, begging Marta to believe him. And, she realizes, she does.

“So what happened?” she asks.

“We went to Buenos Aires and stayed with Eduardo and Palomba. They are good, kind people, Marta, that much is true, and she could have stayed with them for as long as she wanted to, but in private she made clear to me that she didn’t want to stay in that house a day longer than she had to. She would stay in Argentina, like he asked, but she would not live under surveillance from people who would be reporting back to him. Eduardo had arranged a photography apprenticeship for her at an advertising agency, but she declined that, too, because anything Pelayo or his friends provided for her was something else they could use against her or take away if she displeased them. And she said she was not willing to live like that.”

Marta clenches her jaw. That sounds like Fina. Principled beyond the point where it served her.

“So where did she go? What did she do?”

“I don’t know,” Dario says, and Marta is tired of hearing those words from his mouth. “All I can tell you is that I spent days learning the city with her, looking at job advertisements in the newspaper, and visiting boarding houses with her, posing as her cousin.”

“Boarding houses,” Marta echoes. Boarding houses are hardly dignified accommodation. Would Fina even have known how to tell the difference between a legitimate boarding house for women and a bordello? Would Dario?

“They were more affordable,” Dario explains, “and anyway, she said she was quite frightened of the idea of renting an apartment because she had never lived alone anywhere before, let alone in a strange country. But we looked at nice places, Marta, in neighbourhoods that Eduardo promised me were good, safe ones. On three separate evenings I went out watched the front doors of several of them, to make sure there weren’t men stumbling in and out. These weren’t unhappy places.”

Marta presses her palm to her forehead. “Do this… Eduardo and Palomba, do they know where she is?”

“I doubt it. She was dead set on escaping anything and anyone connected to Pelayo as soon as she could.”

Marta closes her eyes. “Is there anything else you can tell me?”

Dario pauses. “No. No, I think that’s everything.”

Outside has grown dark now. She turns to look out the window again. The streetlights casts amber circles on the pavement.

“I’m so sorry, Marta,” Dario says again. She can see his face in the reflection, still red and tear-streaked. “If I can do anything—”

“Can you contact your friends tomorrow? Ask them if they know anything of where she is?”

“Of course,” Dario says, nodding so fast his head looks like a children’s toy on springs. “Yes. But how should I reach you?”

He can’t call the house, of course. There is too much risk Pelayo would find out. And her presence in the office isn’t consistent enough for him to call her there.

“Send a confidential telegram to my office,” she says, turning and walking back toward him. “Give me some paper, I’ll write down the address.”

He retrieves a notepad from next to the telephone on the end-table. As she writes, she feels a now-familiar exhaustion setting into her bones, making her hand shake and her eyes burn. The luncheon Dario prepared sits grey and uneaten on the sideboard, and Marta knows she is suffering from lack of eating over the past two days, but she is also not hungry.

“I think I’m too tired to drive home tonight,” she says, as she hands him back the notepad. “Might I use your telephone to call a hotel?”

“Please, you’re very welcome to stay here,” Dario says. “I have a lovely spare bedroom upstairs, and it’s the least I can do.”

But she needs to be alone. She needs to take a long, hot shower, and she needs to let herself dwell on these days of revelation until her brain has made enough sense of them to let her think about anything else.

Fina. Who never wanted to leave her.

Fina, her wife, who was forced from her side by her husband, and has been living for months, now, across the Atlantic, in the colonies for God’s sake, thinking that Marta hadn’t cared enough to come looking.

“Thank you, Dario, but I think I’d like some privacy tonight.”

He doesn’t push. He just gestures toward the phone and asks if she needs to see the phone book. She realizes that she does: she usually stays at one of Pelayo’s hotels, but she refuses to do that tonight.

She reserves a room at a discreet boutique hotel where she has never stayed before—one where she considered staying with Fina a few times when they would flee to Madrid, before they had their house. Then she gathers her things, and Dario walks her to his front door.

“I won’t ask you to forgive me,” he says, quietly. “I just want you to know that if I had known about the blackmail beforehand, I never would have helped him.”

Marta looks down at her gloves in her hands, the leather creasing in her tight grip. “She was as safe as she could be with you,” she says. “She was a young, beautiful woman who had never travelled more than fifty kilometers from Toledo. You provided her with the protection of a man’s company without any of the threat so many men would pose to a woman like her. Had you declined, he would have found someone else, and that someone would surely have been worse.”

Finally she looks up at him. “I am angry. With him, with you. With her, for succumbing to his pressure without coming to me for help. And most of all with myself, for letting him smile at me, comfort me, pretend to love me for all these months, when—” Her throat closes as though someone had clenched a fist around it, her diaphragm pressing against a vacuum. “I’m angry, but I don’t hold you responsible,” she manages to say. “You don’t need any forgiveness from me.”

“We’ve both been made unwitting accomplices to his wrongdoings, I suppose,” Dario replies. His eyes are still red, but he is recovering, his voice steadying.

Marta nods. “The only thing I couldn’t forgive would be if you continued to long for him after this. You deserve love from a better man than him.”

Dario laughs sadly and glances back toward the newspaper sitting on the living room end-table, its haunting headline bent over the fold. “I will not forgive him for this. Whatever we might have had, once: it’s over now.” He looks back at her. “And you? If there’s anything I can do to help you extricate yourself from him…”

But there’s nothing. Nothing that wouldn’t endanger Dario more than Pelayo, anyway, and that is not an acceptable sacrifice.

“Thank you,” Marta says.

She walks down to her car. Twenty-five minutes later she is in her hotel room. She will have to rise early; she hasn’t brought a nightgown or a change of clothes. Tomorrow she can stop at the mountain house to change her clothes on the way to the office, and tonight she can sleep in her slip.

The evening has made her want to slough off a layer of skin. She sets the shower to scald, feels herself redden under the spray, uses the sting to try to focus the chaos of her thoughts. Grief, anger. Betrayal. But over all of that: a sense of violation so deep she feels it like a physical trace, imagines fingerprints on her body like the evidence of a crime. She remembers Fina, after Santiago, how it had taken weeks for her to stop feeling his hands on her skin. Marta thinks, now, of every time she has let Pelayo comfort her, about how she sought solace from her grief in recommitting herself to him. She thinks of all the nights she has fallen asleep to the sound of his breathing, all the days when he promised, with kindness in his eyes, that his investigator was still looking for Fina. Who was the “detective” Marta had spoken to on the phone? An actor, a con man? And in her grief, Pelayo had used her: he had made her his prop, the perfect governor’s wife, had her entertaining his political contacts, had used her like she belonged to him.

Nausea surges again. She stumbles out of the shower and heaves the meagre contents of her stomach into the toilet bowl, and then heaves again, until there’s nothing left but bile.

He has used her and used her and used her like a thing, like an object, like a possession, manipulation under a perverse mask of caring for months on end.

Fina’s words, from her letter—that letter she has memorized for how many times she tortured herself by reading it—rise to the forefront of her mind. Un hombre terrible que se sentia mi dueño por el simple hecho de ser mujer.

Marta stands, leaning over the toilet as she had yesterday in the governor’s mansion, her whole body shivering despite the steam coming from the still-running shower.  

She has never experienced physical aggression from a man. But she feels small, outside herself. An itch of filth that no shower will scrub off, the place where his head rested on her chest two nights ago when he sought comfort from her, knots of revulsion and self-loathing manifesting into an edge of dissociation from her own body. He has never laid a hand on her in anger, he would never dream of causing her physical harm. And yet she feels the violation in every bone, in every pore. She has never, ever been a person to him, and in this moment that feels like enough to make her wonder if she was ever a person at all.

Before she climbs into bed, she remembers her promise to call Cloe.

Cloe picks up on the second ring. “Hello?”

“Hi. It’s me.”

A long exhale. “I’d been debating whether to risk your father’s ire by calling the house. You’re home, then?”

“No. My… meeting… ran late, and I decided to stay the night in a hotel. Don’t worry, I’ll get up early and be in the office on time.”

“For goodness’ sake, Marta, you know I’m not worried about that.”

Silence hangs on the line for a moment.

“Have you eaten anything today, Marta?”

“A little.”

“Not enough, surely. I know what you’re like when you’re stressed. Order something to your room, even just—”

“You were right.”

Silence, again.

“My favourite words to hear,” Cloe says, her tone not quite meeting the levity of the words. “Right about what?”

“About Pelayo. And Fina. Last night.”

Another pause. “I don’t unders—”

“He got rid of her.”

Still more silence, and then a long, low exhale on the far end of the phone.

“Got rid of her how?”

“Blackmailed her to force her to leave me. Not just me: to leave Spain entirely. He sent her to Argentina.”

“What?!”

Marta pinches the bridge of her nose. “I know.”

“How did he blackmail her? What does he have?”

“I don’t know.”

“Fuck.”

Something about that: the curse word, curt and direct, is the first thing to make Marta almost give half a smile. “Fuck is right.”

“Where are you staying? I’ll drive up—”

“No.”

It comes out more forcefully than Marta intends. But it’s only as she utters the word that she realizes that she absolutely, unequivocally does not want Cloe to come anywhere near her right now.

The entirety of their—of whatever they’ve had together—has been transformed into an infidelity, and Marta cannot handle the paradox of her accidental mistress trying to console her over the violence committed against her wife.

She shouldn’t have called.

“I’m worried about you being alone with this,” Cloe says softly.

“I appreciate that. I do. But I promise, I’m all right. I just need to be alone.”

Another long silence. They have never struggled to talk to each other, Marta and Cloe, but neither has very much to say right now.

“Pelayo didn’t call for you today,” Cloe says, eventually.

Well, Marta thinks. That’s one good thing, at least.

“All right. Thanks. Well—I’m exhausted. I’ll see you in the morning,” she says.

“Eat something before you sleep. Please, Marta, I mean it.”

But Marta does not want to hear Cloe’s advice right now—or anything else that reminds her that Cloe cares about her.

She truly should never have called. Cloe would have worried, but she would have forgiven her.

“Okay,” she says, because she doesn’t want to argue. “Good night, Cloe.”

“Good night.”