Upstairs, you hear your mother moving in her room on the second floor, the faint thud of a dresser drawer closing. Esteban is still asleep on the third floor—or pretending to be. Your younger brother Tomás, Lucía’s husband, left before sunrise for his shift at the parts warehouse. The house is waking the way houses always do, in fragments, and suddenly you resent the timing of ordinary life.
“Tonight,” Lucía says. “On the roof. After everyone’s asleep.”
You should insist on now.
You should demand answers in daylight, in the kitchen, surrounded by cabinets, clean dishes, and practical objects that could stand as witnesses. But something in Lucía’s face stops you. It is not stubbornness. It is fear stretched thin enough to resemble courtesy.
So you nod once.
“Tonight,” you say.
All day, the house feels staged.
Your mother comes downstairs in her robe, complaining about her knee and asking if there are eggs left. Esteban appears ten minutes later, scratching his chest, kissing your cheek, complaining that he slept poorly even though you know he slept like a rock. When he sees Lucía at the stove, his expression shifts so quickly you almost miss it. Not desire. Not irritation. Something far stranger.
Recognition.
It lasts less than a second.
Then it vanishes, replaced by his usual mildness. “Morning,” he says.
Lucía does not meet his eyes. “Morning.”
You feel the exchange like a chill across the back of your neck.
For the first time, the strange arrangement in your bed begins to rearrange itself in your mind. Until now, you have treated Lucía’s nightly presence as a problem orbiting shame, propriety, and gossip. A strange family habit. A boundary issue. Something to resent because it made your home feel absurd and your marriage feel invaded.
But now another possibility opens.
What if Lucía has not been sleeping between you and Esteban because she fears the dark?
What if she fears him?
The thought is so ugly your mind rejects it at once.
Not Esteban.
Not your husband who rubs menthol into your mother’s shoulder when her arthritis flares. Not the man who once drove three hours through a storm to pick up your cousin when her car broke down outside Tlaxcala. Not the man who folds grocery bags and lines them up under the sink with almost obsessive neatness. Esteban is not cruel. He is not reckless. He is not one of those men whose darkness clings to them like cologne.
And yet.
