After a pause, he says, “If you want, I’ll help you file a report later. Even if he goes in. Especially if he goes in. There should be a record.”
You look at him, surprised by the practicality of that. By the respect. Not telling you what to do. Not turning your pain into his performance of righteousness. Just giving you information like you are a woman capable of making decisions, not a fragile thing that needs steering.
“I’ll think about it,” you say.
“Okay.”
A few minutes later Diego comes back with a phone charger, a second shirt, and the old baseball cap he wears when he wants to disappear in public. His face is washed, though his eyes are red. He won’t meet yours at first.
Then he does.
“Can I…” He stops. Starts over. “Can I say something?”
You nod.
He takes a breath that seems to scrape him on the way in. “I remember when I was ten and got that fever really bad. You stayed up all night putting cold towels on my neck. I kept waking up and every time I opened my eyes, you were there.” He swallows. “I knew last night. Right after. I knew I’d done something I couldn’t just joke away or blame away. I just… I couldn’t stand it. So I left the room in my head before I even left the house.”
The confession is clumsy, but it is also the most honest thing you have heard from him in years.
He looks at the floor. “I’m sorry I made you afraid of me.”
That one almost breaks you.
You step closer but not too close. Not close enough to erase the boundary the room has worked so hard to build. Close enough only to let him hear you without distance becoming a shield.
“I love you,” you say. “That is why this has to change.”
He nods, crying again.
Then, after a beat, he asks the question buried underneath all the others. “What if I can’t do it?”
Roberto answers first this time, and his voice is steadier than yours could be. “Then you go back the next day and try again. But this version of your life is over. One way or another.”
The drive to Monterrey happens in Roberto’s truck.
You ride in the passenger seat. Diego sits in the back, looking out the window most of the time like the highway itself might tell him who he becomes next. No one plays music. No one fills the silence. The city thins and shifts around you—gas stations, concrete, painted walls, heat rising off the road in trembling waves.
At a stoplight, you catch your reflection in the side mirror and barely recognize yourself.
Not because of the bruise.
Because of the eyes. They look older. Sadder. But clearer. Like a woman who finally stopped negotiating with the reality in front of her.
The intake center is not what Diego expected.
Not a locked institution. Not some grim punishment facility built to shame broken people into behaving. It’s a converted property behind a gate, with shaded benches, a small courtyard, white walls, and an office that smells faintly of disinfectant and coffee. A nurse with kind eyes takes his paperwork. A counselor speaks to him like he is still a human being. Which, you realize, might be the thing he trusts least.
At the desk, Diego hesitates over the clipboard.
Then he signs.
You had thought the hardest part would be making him come here.
It isn’t.
The hardest part is the goodbye.
Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just brutal in that quiet, ordinary way real turning points usually are. A hallway. A duffel bag. A staff member waiting politely three feet away. Diego shifting his weight from one foot to the other as if he is both twenty-three and six years old at the same time.
He looks at you.
“I don’t know what to say.”
