What I Saw Through the Window Before My Wedding

Once again, Marisol had ruined her makeup. She was a sea of tears, and her friends tried to comfort her as best they could, with tissues, with jokes, with that insistent tenderness that ended up drowning her. That morning she had already cried several times, and at times she could barely breathe. She was nervous, very nervous, and having three women hovering over her, fixing her veil, did absolutely nothing to help.

All she wanted was to see Damián. To take refuge for a second in his chest, to feel his scent, to kiss him slowly. One last time as fiancés, before the priest turned them into husband and wife in front of half the village.

“I’m going to the bathroom for a minute,” she lied, and no one followed her.

She slipped out of the cabin in silence, gathering up the skirt of her dress so it wouldn’t drag on the ground. Damián’s cabin was in the opposite wing of the country complex, on the other side of the gardens where the guests were already settling in. If anyone saw her in her wedding dress before the ceremony, they’d give her the usual lecture about bad luck, so she decided to go around through the wooded area behind.

It was madness, she knew that. The mud, the branches, the white satin. But the need to see him outweighed any superstition.

She moved forward close to the tree trunks, calculating each step. Everyone was in the garden, busy with the flowers and champagne, so it was unlikely they’d catch her crossing between the trees like a fugitive. She imagined Damián inside, surrounded by his friends, the ones who were surely urging him to drink something strong for his nerves. He’d refuse, of course. To Marisol, her man was the ideal man, the kind of male the others should aspire to. She considered herself the envy of all her friends, and she wasn’t wrong.

She reached the cabin with her heart pounding in her throat. She tried the front door gently: locked. She smiled to herself. She’d surprise him through the back window, scare him, then kiss him, and run back before anyone noticed she was gone.

She went around the wooden structure and peered through the glass of the back window, which looked into the living room.

In the end, the only one who was surprised was her.

***

Damián was stretched out on the long dining table, his feet resting on the back of a chair and the wedding shirt open over his chest. On top of him, riding and moving, was a woman. A blonde with a lush, well-proportioned body, her heels dug into the edge of the table, holding on to the back of another chair to control every thrust.

He held her just above the knees, but she was the one setting the pace. A brutal, shameless pace that made that pair of enormous breasts bounce in time with a string of pearls swaying like a pendulum.

Marisol felt a wave of dizziness that nearly dropped her onto the damp grass. Her head caught fire, her vision blurred, and a bitter taste rose in her throat. The tears found their own way down her cheeks as she sank down, curled in on herself, beneath the sill.

Those cabins had incredible soundproofing. And yet the moans, the gasps, the scrape of skin against wood, everything reached her ears booming with impossible force, as if the whole forest had decided to amplify her humiliation. A deafening buzz filled her temples.

It isn’t true. It can’t be him. Not today.

But it was him. She recognized every gesture of his, the way he clenched his jaw, the way his fists tightened when pleasure overwhelmed him.

She wanted to run and couldn’t. She stayed glued to the ground, hugging her knees while her dress stained with dirt, listening to the obscene concert coming from the cabin. They were cheating. Cheating on the very day of her wedding, two hours from the altar. That was already a betrayal that split a life in two.

And then, gathering a courage she hadn’t known she had, she peeked again. She needed to confirm something. Something she had caught out of the corner of her eye and her mind refused flat-out to accept.

***

The woman had a look of pleasure that didn’t fit on her face, the smile of someone completely in control of the situation. She looked seasoned, confident, a woman who knew exactly how to give and how to receive. In the first blow of the scene, blinded by shock, Marisol hadn’t recognized her. Now, with the lucidity of horror, she saw her clearly.

The blonde riding her fiancé, the bitch moaning on the table with the pearls bouncing, was Rosaura. Her mother-in-law. Damián’s mother.

Her stomach twisted. It was no longer a simple infidelity. It was the most horrific sin she could imagine, happening inches from her, behind a pane of glass. If anyone else were witness to that, mother and son’s lives would be destroyed by scandal forever. The surname, the family business, the immaculate reputation of the Valdèses: all of it reduced to ashes.

And yet, in the middle of the pain, something perverse rose inside Marisol. A cold cynicism, almost amusing. She had to admit it: those two were having the time of their lives.

She had always envied Rosaura. For her impossible body at that age, for her charisma, for the way she dressed with such taste, for that marriage everyone believed was stable and perfect. She had envied her in silence since the day she entered that family. But never, ever, had she envied her as much as in that moment, seeing her rise and fall over the body of the only man Marisol loved. The man who, she now discovered, they both loved.

Despite everything, she stayed. She waited. She waited until Damián, with a savage roar she knew from so many nights together, finished. She watched him prop himself up on his elbows. She saw mother and son find each other’s mouths and give each other a long, passionate, sincere kiss, a kiss that had nothing casual or farewell about it and very much the flavor of an old habit.

Rosaura pulled away slowly, catching her breath. With expert fingers she removed the condom, tied it neatly, and put it away in her elegant clutch, as if filing away evidence. Then she smoothed her hair in the reflection of the glass, unaware that on the other side, a handspan away, her daughter-in-law was watching her with ruined makeup.

There was nothing else to see. The pair would get themselves ready for the day’s big event and she needed to return before her absence became obvious.

***

On the way back through the woods, Marisol walked like an automaton, dodging branches without seeing them. Jealousy gnawed at her from the inside, acidic, but alongside it something else she hadn’t expected was growing: a cold, almost serene clarity.

She wondered whether Damián would ever love her as much as he loved his mother. Whether there would be room in him for another woman beside Rosaura. And then, with a maturity that surprised even her, she reached a conclusion.

From today on, I sleep in his bed. Every night. She has a secret; I’ll have a ring.

From now on she would have all the nights in the world to become the first woman in her husband’s mind. She would work at it. She would win him over centimeter by centimeter. If her mother-in-law had played with an advantage for years, she would play with patience.

She wiped the tears from the back of her hand, took a deep breath, and composed her face before going back into her cabin. Her friends greeted her with a cry of relief.

“Where did you disappear to? We have to touch you up all over again!”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and for the first time all morning her voice sounded firm. “I needed a moment alone. I’m fine now.”

And she was, in a twisted way no one around her would have understood.

***

A couple of hours later, they both said yes before the altar, amid the guests’ sincere joy. Marisol smiled with the bouquet in her hands, looking Damián in the eyes, measuring him, studying him, knowing what she knew.

At the main table, Rosaura took the microphone for a toast. With a brazenness only Marisol could read in its full dimension, she dared to remember the day of her own wedding and to talk about how happy she had always been in love. The guests applauded, moved. The bride squeezed the glass until her knuckles turned white, and she toasted with a perfect smile.

Later, during the banquet, she saw her mother-in-law lean over Damián’s ear and ask him, with a touch on the shoulder, to accompany her outside for a moment. He stood up without hesitation, with that calm obedience that now took on a new and nauseating meaning. Marisol knew, with absolute certainty, that they would slip away to do one of their little tricks while the musicians tuned up.

She kept the rage inside. Buried it very deep, where no one could smell it, and turned it into strategy. She took a sip of champagne, greeted a distant aunt, let a cousin pull her out to dance.

I lost the first round. I accept it.

But the wedding night was hers. And the next one, and the next, and all the ones to come under the same roof. Rosaura had experience and the past; Marisol had the future and the marital bed. She was ready to fight, and something told her that this forbidden, silent war had only just begun.