I thought my husband didn’t desire me, until his mother confessed: “I did it this way”

“I can’t take this anymore, Mom… I don’t know how much longer I can pretend.”

It wasn’t unusual for Mateo to go to her when he felt unwell. We all lived in the same building, in the old part of Guadalajara, and Elea always found a reason to need him: high blood pressure, insomnia, dizziness, recurring sadness.

What took my breath away was the way he said it.

Short.

Inside.

Intimate.

I pressed myself against the hallway wall as the rain pounded against the windows, the pressure on my chest almost making me groan. Then I heard Elea’s voice.

—Speak more quietly. You’ll wake her up.

“Perhaps it’s time for me to wake up,” Mateo replied.

I felt a chill from head to toe.

The door was ajar. I peered through the crack.

Mateo was sitting on the edge of his mother’s bed.

Elea, dressed in a purple robe, caressed his face with an almost supernatural tenderness. Her fingers glided over his jaw as if she knew every curve by heart. Mateo remained seated with his eyes closed.

My stomach turned.

“I warned you before the wedding,” Elea muttered. “That silly girl will be older than you.”

— Don’t talk about Camila like that.

—Then stop looking at me like it’s all my fault.

A dense and heavy silence took over the place, a silence that seemed to have a body.

I didn’t understand what I was seeing, but my skin did. My whole body knew, before my mind, that something was wrong. Something I couldn’t name without feeling ashamed.

I took a step back.

The floor creaked.

Inside, everything fell silent.

“Who’s there?” Elea asked.

I didn’t think twice. I ran to the room I shared with Mateo, got into bed, and clumsily pretended to be asleep. A few seconds later, I heard footsteps.

The door opened slowly. I felt Mateo stop at the edge of the bed. I closed my eyes tightly. His presence had lasted too long.

Then he left.

He returned just an hour later.

And when he finally went to bed, leaving between us the same cold distance as the last three years, I heard something terrible: my husband didn’t know how to touch me.

Because he learned to play where he should never have played.

I didn’t sleep a minute.

The next morning, Guadalajara awoke to a gray sky, with that damp smell that rain leaves on bougainvillea and cement. Elea was already in the kitchen, pouring herself coffee as if nothing had happened.

Mateo was reading the news on his phone. They both seemed calm, impeccable, normal. I looked at them as if they were strangers.

“You don’t look well,” Elea said without looking up. “You obviously didn’t sleep well.”

The way he said it made me think he knew exactly what I was seeing.

“I heard a noise,” I replied.

Mateo looked up. Our eyes met for a moment.

That was enough.

There was fear in his eyes.

Neither anger. Nor shame.

Fear.

“Mom was nervous about the storm,” she said too quickly. “I just went to keep her company.”

—Of course —I replied.

I didn’t say anything else.

Because when the truth is too big, it must first be kept in solitude before it can be brought to the center of the table.

That same day I went to see my mother in Zapopan under the pretext of delivering her insurance documents. As soon as she saw me at the door, she realized something was wrong.

– What happened, daughter?

For years, I answered “nothing” when someone asked me about my marriage. But that night, I sat in his living room and cried as if I had suddenly turned red.

The price of everything.

Wedding.

Cold.

Excuses.

Midnight.

The hand of Elea and the face of Matthew.

Phrase: “I’m done with this.”

My mother listened to me in silence, growing paler by the minute. When I finished, she stared at the floor for a few seconds.

—Tell me you don’t think the same as me—I whispered.

He closed his eyes.

“I think about a lot of things,” she finally said. “And I don’t like it.”

Do you think that between them…

I couldn’t finish.

The tongue is stuck.

My mother took my hand.

“I don’t know exactly what their connection is. But I do know it’s toxic. And I also know you can’t keep living like this without answers.”

That night I returned home with a decision that made my back tremble.

I didn’t want to scream.

But just for a moment, and you’ll survive this.

One more question.

But upon entering, I found Elea alone in the room, embroidering with that calm of a respectable lady that she always used as armor.

—Mateo went to the office —she said without looking at me—. He’ll be back late.

I stood in front of her.

-Far better.

Elea looked up. She didn’t seem surprised. Simply resigned, as if she had known this moment would come for years.

“What did you see last night?” she asked.

The coldness of her voice froze me.

– Enough.

She placed the embroidery on the table.

– No. It’s still not enough.

“Then explain it to me,” I blurted out, unable to contain my trembling. “What kind of relationship do you have with your son?”

Elea held my gaze.

He didn’t even blink.

— That connection that destroys life without needing to knock on a single door from the outside.

I frowned.

I didn’t understand it.

And then she said so calmly that it broke my heart:

“Mateo was always like this. I turned him into this.”

And right at that moment I heard the key turning in the lock of the front door.

PART 2

Mateo entered the room just as I was still trying to process what Elea had just confessed. His shirt was wet from the rain, and his face reflected the tension of someone who knows it’s too late to stop it.

He saw us both standing, face to face.

And it froze.

“Have you told him yet?” he asked, without looking at me.

Elea pursed her lips.

— It’s just begun.

Mateo placed the keys on the console and exhaled. He didn’t seem angry. He seemed exhausted. As if he had spent years preparing for this moment and still didn’t know how to face it.

—Sit down, Camila—he told me.

— I don’t want to sit down. I want to know what’s going on in this house.

No one answered right away. Outside, it was still raining. The sound of the water hitting the flowerpots in the yard sounded like a countdown. Elea went to the window and stood with her back to us.

“Your father-in-law died when Mateo was fourteen,” she said without turning around. “Not from an illness or an accident. He was electrocuted at a construction site. And it was Mateo who found him.”