“Claudia and I want to start our life together,” he said.

“Her baby just turned one.

My son.

I’ve waited long enough.”

Claudia was not a stranger to me.

Claudia had been my best friend since high school.

When I was diagnosed with the tumor, six months earlier, she had been the first person to put her arms around me, weeping, promising she would help take care of Alejandro while I went through treatment so that I would have one less thing to worry about.

I had wept too, into her shoulder, grateful past words that I had a friend like her in the worst season of my life.

Now, lying in that bed, I understood at last what kind of help she had been providing my husband for the last several years.

Alejandro kept talking, and it was the calm in his voice that frightened me, far more than the words — the serene, unbothered composure of a man reading out a decision he made a long time ago and has grown wholly comfortable with.

“Look, Camila, I don’t want to be cruel,” he said, which is a thing only cruel people say, “but you could never give me children.

And now you’re sick.

Claudia is young, and healthy, and she gave me a boy.

I deserve a real family too.”