Chapter 3 - Skeletons in the Country House
The wedding feast was a masterpiece of Basque-Castilian fusion, but for Álvaro Rivas, every bite of roasted lamb tasted like wet cardboard.
He was seated at Table 4, diagonally across the glass-roofed conservatory from the head family table. Every time he looked up, he saw them.
Elena was laughing. It was a sound he hadn't heard in nearly a decade—bright, uninhibited, and completely free of the suffocating weight that used to hang over their home. Daniel sat beside her, his arm draped casually over the back of her chair, leaning in occasionally to whisper something that made her cheeks flush a delicate rose. Lucía was sitting on a booster seat between them, happily coloring on a customized menu with crayons Daniel had produced from his inside jacket pocket with casual, paternal ease.
They looked like a portrait of an untouchable family.
And Álvaro felt like an outsider peeking through the frosted window of a life he had been told was impossible.
"Eat your dinner, Álvaro," Marta muttered from beside him, her voice tight, barely moving her lips as she smiled stiffly for a passing photographer. "People are watching you stare. You look pathetic."
"I look pathetic?" Álvaro turned to her, his voice dropping into a vicious growl. "You just told the woman who raised my cousins that she was barren, and thirty seconds later her four-year-old child ran into her arms. Who do you think looks pathetic, Marta?"
Marta slammed her silver fork down against the linen. "I was defending us! I was defending *you*! For five years, she has acted like the saint while everyone blamed me for breaking up your miserable marriage! I wanted to remind her why she lost!"
"Well, you failed," Álvaro hissed, his eyes narrowing. "Because she didn't lose anything. Did she?"
Marta turned her head away, her chest rising and falling in shallow, jagged breaths.
Halfway through the second course, Elena excused herself from the table. She kissed Lucía’s temple, whispered something to Daniel, and stepped out toward the restroom corridor located in the historic wing of the estate.
Álvaro didn't hesitate.
"Álvaro, don't you dare—" Marta began, reaching for his wrist.
"Get your hands off me," he snarled under his breath, standing up so abruptly his chair screeched against the polished stone floor.
He slipped through the side doors, cutting through the dimly lit library that connected the reception hall to the private stone corridors. His pulse was thumping violently in his ears. He didn't know what he wanted. An explanation? An apology? A confession that she had cheated on him during their final, miserable months together?
He needed her to be the guilty one. If Elena wasn't broken, if Elena wasn't the flawed party in their failed union, then the entire structure of Álvaro’s life—his justification for the infidelity, his pride, his family’s legacy—was nothing more than a grotesque, cruel joke.
He caught up to her near the arched exit of the gallery, where the sound of the wedding orchestra faded into a distant, muffled hum.
"Elena."
She stopped. She didn't jump. She simply closed her eyes for a single second, took a deep breath, and turned around to face him under the amber glow of the wrought-iron sconces.
"You really don't know when to quit, do you, Álvaro?" she asked, her voice laced with sheer exhaustion.
"How long?" he demanded, taking two heavy strides toward her, cornering her against the stone archway. "How long were you seeing him before we signed the papers?"
Elena stared at him, genuinely baffled for a moment, before a sharp, bitter laugh escaped her lips.
"Is that what you’ve been stewing over at your table?" she asked. "You think I cheated on you?"
"The girl is four years and three months old, Elena!" Álvaro’s voice rose, trembling with suppressed hysteria. "You do the damn math! She was conceived within weeks of you leaving our apartment! Nobody moves on that fast! Nobody gets pregnant that quickly after seven years of complete, absolute failure—unless you were sleeping with him while you were still wearing my ring!"
Elena didn't shrink back. In fact, she stepped forward, closing the distance between them until she was looking directly into his bloodshot eyes.
"I met Daniel three months after I walked out of your house, Álvaro," she said, each word sharp, deliberate, and icy. "I was broken. I weighed forty-five kilos. I was living in a rental studio, convinced that my body was a graveyard because you and your mother had spent seven years hammering that lie into my brain."
"It wasn't a lie!" he shouted. "We had the tests! We had the clinic reports!"
"Did we?" Elena’s eyes flashed with a dangerous, sudden fire. "Did we have the tests, Álvaro? Because after I collapsed from exhaustion four months after our divorce, Daniel took me to the Ruber International Clinic. Not to your family’s private, hand-picked doctor. To an independent team of reproductive endocrinologists."
Álvaro went completely still. "And?"
"And they ran a complete fertility workup on me," Elena whispered, her voice dropping into a register of terrifying calm. "My ovarian reserve was exceptional. My fallopian tubes were completely clear. My hormone panels were flawless. The chief of endocrinology sat me down, held my hand, and told me that physiologically, there was absolutely nothing preventing me from carrying a child."
Álvaro shook his head, his hands coming up to clutch his temples. "No. No, that's impossible. We tried for seven years! We timed cycles! We did three rounds of intrauterine insemination!"
"And who provided the samples for those inseminations, Álvaro?" Elena asked, stepping closer, her gaze pinning him to the stone wall. "Who handed the sealed vials directly to Dr. Castillo? Who insisted that his mother handle the courier services so the media wouldn't get wind of the Rivas heir having issues?"
Álvaro felt the floor tilting beneath his feet. "What are you saying?"
"I’m saying that when Daniel and I decided to build a life together, I fell pregnant within four weeks," Elena said, her voice ringing with the absolute, unassailable truth. "I didn't need hormone shots. I didn't need experimental therapies. I just needed a real man whose body wasn't firing blanks, and whose soul wasn't poisoned by pride."
Álvaro’s breath stopped.
"You’re lying," he choked out, though his voice sounded thin, like brittle glass. "You’re just saying this to destroy me."
"I don't need to destroy you, Álvaro," Elena said softly, stepping around him toward the bright light of the reception hall. "You and your mother destroyed yourselves years ago. You just haven't realized the rubble has settled yet."
May you like
She walked away, the hem of her sea-green dress sweeping cleanly across the stone floor, leaving Álvaro alone in the dark corridor, choking on his own suffocating doubt.
***
