She came without shoes, with smudged makeup and one hand on her stomach.

—Wait—he said.

I turned around.

For a second I thought he was going to insult me. Or beg me for something. Or blame me for everything.

But not.

He just looked at me with immense defeat.

“I didn’t know about the studies,” she whispered. “Or about Rodrigo. I… I thought someone was finally choosing me.”

I watched her for a long time.

It was difficult to pity a woman who moved into my house believing herself superior. But it was also impossible not to see that she, in her own way, had also been used by the same kind of man who used me.

“He didn’t choose you,” I told him. “He used you. Just like he used me. The difference is that it took me ten years to understand that.”

Paola lowered her gaze.

—What are you going to do now?

I looked out at the night. The fresh air. The lit garden. The open door.

—Leave here —I replied—. And for the first time in a long time, to do it by my own choice.

It didn’t stop me.

He never spoke again.

I left without looking back.

In the car, with my hands already on the steering wheel, I burst into tears.

Not for Ricardo. Not for the mansion. Not even for the lost decade. I cried for the woman I became to survive him. For everything he made me believe about myself. For all the times I accepted crumbs of dignity because I thought I couldn’t aspire to anything else.

But the crying didn’t last forever.

Nothing lasts forever. Not even pain, when it finally stops feeding on silence.

Two months later, I was living in a small, bright apartment, paid for with an account my lawyers managed to free up from the common funds before Ricardo could empty it. I found a job at a gallery. I slept alone. I ate in peace. And something strange began to happen: my body, that same body I’d been taught to hate for years, stopped feeling defective.