“Make it quick,” I replied. “Tomorrow I have to talk to a lawyer.”
His eyes widened slightly.
“You’re serious?”
“I’ve never been more serious in my life.”
He ordered a black coffee; I asked for chamomile tea that tasted like nothing. Diego stared at his cup as if the right answer might be floating inside it.
“What happened tonight…” he began. “It wasn’t just a bad joke.”
“I know. Javier never jokes—he just feels untouchable.”
Diego swallowed.
“For months he’s been talking about you like that when we go out. He says you’re ‘below his league,’ that you married him to get out of your neighborhood, that…” he hesitated, “that you owe him your life.”
It didn’t surprise me as much as it should have. I had heard softened versions at home, small stabs wrapped in sarcasm. But something in Diego’s voice unsettled me.
“I can imagine that,” I said. “You didn’t call me out at one in the morning to tell me that.”
His fingers began tapping against the cup.
“There’s something else. A bet.”
A different kind of cold ran through me—sharper.
“What bet?”
Diego took a deep breath.
“At Christmas, when he closed the contract with the Barcelona studio, he got drunk. He said your marriage was a ‘temporary investment’ and that as soon as he signed that project and secured the bonus, he’d leave you. Sergio, like an idiot, told him he didn’t have the guts. So they made a bet.”
I felt my jaw tighten.
“A bet… about me?”
“About your life,” Diego corrected quietly. “Javier bet that you would endure another whole year, no matter how much he humiliated you in public, while he started ‘preparing the transition’ to a woman ‘at his level.’ Literally. Those were his words.”
The café around me faded slightly. The lamp above us, the waitress collecting teaspoons—everything felt distant.
“And you were there?” I asked.
“Yes. And I didn’t say anything,” he admitted. “I laughed like the others. At first I thought it was just another one of his boasts. But then I saw the way he spoke to you, the way you were fading. And tonight… tonight he crossed a line.”
I wanted to hate him in that moment as much as I hated Javier. But the only thing I felt was a strange calm, a kind of emptiness where the pain used to be.
“Why are you telling me now?” I asked. “Why not months ago?”
For the first time that night, Diego held my gaze.