He must have gotten home or emerged from wherever he was hiding and found the room emptier than cowardice expected. You stare at his name until the screen stops glowing. Then comes Lucía, your sister-in-law, which almost makes you laugh from the sheer audacity. Then doña Carmen. Then Alejandro again.
You answer none of them.
At the station, the benches are hard, the air smells of diesel, tamales, and human patience, and the world is full of people carrying more visible suffering than yours. Women with children asleep on their laps. Men with taped suitcases. A teenage girl holding a box with air holes cut into the sides because something living inside keeps shifting. Nobody cares that your marriage ended today. Nobody knows that you left one house empty-handed and discovered another life in a trash bag ten minutes later.
That anonymity feels sacred.
So you sit quietly with the envelope tucked under your blouse like contraband and wait for the bus.
The ride to Oaxaca is long enough for the body to remember pain in layers.
At first you feel only the immediate hurt. The divorce. The humiliation. The years in Guadalajara spent trying to become acceptable to people who measured worth by usefulness and bloodline. Then, as the highway unspools and the cities thin into dust, hills, and long stretches of open heat, older griefs begin surfacing too. Leaving Oaxaca at twenty-eight because marriage was supposed to be the start of a wider life. Your mother’s proud tears at the bus station. Your own small hope that love might make the world less narrow.
Instead, marriage had narrowed it.
Not all at once. You know that now with painful precision.
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