The divorce papers were still warm from the printer when Diego Ramirez pushed the black card across the mahogany table like he was tipping someone he found beneath his usual consideration. It spun once and stopped near my hand. Nobody in the room spoke.
Not because Diego’s cruelty was surprising. He had been practicing it for months with the focused dedication he applied to everything he wanted to master. The silence was something else.
It was the specific silence of people who have gathered to watch a performance and are waiting for the satisfying part. Diego leaned back in his chair. “Take it, Isabella,” he said.
“That should cover a modest rental for a month or two. Somewhere with a deadbolt. Consider it severance for two years of your life.”
From the window ledge, Camila laughed with the ease of someone who had already decided this morning was a pleasure outing rather than a legal proceeding.
She was watching her phone and watching me simultaneously, managing both with the divided attention of a woman who has never fully committed to anything. “She probably thought making pot roast and crying quietly would be enough,” Camila said. “Poor thing.”
I looked at the card.
I did not touch it. The conference room on the thirty-eighth floor smelled of leather and stale coffee and the specific kind of impatience that money produces when it has been waiting longer than it expected. Rain dragged itself across the giant windows behind Camila, turning Mexico City into a gray impressionist blur.
Diego had chosen this room deliberately. High floor, wide view, the kind of setting designed to make whatever happens inside it feel more significant and to make whatever happens to the smaller person feel more final. He was good at context.
He had been using it against me for the better part of two years. To my left sat Attorney Robles, Diego’s divorce counsel, sweating into a charcoal suit that cost more than it deserved. Beside him was a junior associate whose job appeared to be sliding documents forward and maintaining a look of professional indifference.
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