Taboo

When the elevator doors closed behind my sister-in-law, my son realized the lie he’d told at the table wasn’t going to go unpaid.

When I carried her suitcases upstairs and she bent down in front of me without a shred of shame, I knew those days under my roof would not go as I’d imagined.

I came home from the hospital with my arm in a cast and a thought I couldn’t shake. That night I went to the bathroom, and my mother appeared in the doorway just when I thought I was alone.

It was six forty. She checked her watch, asked me to pull over by the alley, and before I could ask anything, she was already kissing me.

I joked that she should sleep with me that night. I never imagined that after midnight, my bedroom door would actually open.

For weeks I’d been pretending I wasn’t looking at him. That night, with two drinks too many and the house empty, I stopped pretending and went downstairs looking for him.

With mascara running from my tears, she took my hand and led me upstairs, determined that what we felt would no longer be a secret.

I told him I just wanted to practice taking photos. It was a lie. What I really wanted was for him to finally look at me the way I’d been looking at him for weeks.

When Valeria told me her three cousins were waiting to celebrate, I never imagined the celebration meant finding out whether I was good for more than balancing their accounts.

I opened my eyes in the middle of the pleasure and saw her leaning against the doorframe, watching us. She said nothing. She just slid a hand inside her shorts.

The first afternoon I went to help him, I thought I’d only be doing his exercises. I never imagined I’d end up discovering with him everything my home had denied me.

Since I was widowed, my nieces spoiled me and looked after me. That afternoon we were left alone by the pool, and I knew nothing between us would ever be the same again.

No one at the firm imagined what Lorena did during lunch break, two floors down, behind a door she always locked.

I thought she’d laugh at me, that she’d say I was crazy. But when I led her by the wrist to the half-open door, my sister could no longer look away.

I’d spent months covering for him among the worst pack in the prison. The day he told me who the woman in his visits really was, everything changed.

I wrote it thinking no one would ever read it. The day my mother opened that notebook, everything between us stopped having a way back.

She shut the sacristy door, placed her cold hand over mine, and told me she wasn’t a little girl anymore. The wind howled outside and I knew I was lost.

With days left before my trip, she called me for an innocent favor. Neither of us imagined we'd end up locked inside, in the dark, without clothes.

When the yacht went under, Renata thought the sea was the worst thing that could happen to them. She never imagined the real storm would wait for her that night, in a cave, beside her son.

I always thought I knew my brother. Then I went into his room, saw what he was hiding on his screen, and realized nothing between us would ever be the same.