He fucked me relentlessly, his passion and need filling the air like static electricity, present in every touch of his body. He’d gone mad with lust and I’d gone mad for him.

When he was done, both of us breathless and sore, we made each other look presentable again. I smoothed out his collar, patted down his hair where I had pulled on it; he tucked my breasts back into my dress, pushed the hair behind my ears. We grinned at each other, two silly fools in love, and opened the stall door.

There was a woman standing there as if waiting for us to finish.

She already had a look of disgust on her face, but when she laid her eyes on Mateo, they widened as if she’d just seen the biggest spider in the world.

“Mateo?” she cried out in ardent disbelief.

Oh fuck. I swallowed hard and started paying attention to her. She was probably in her late-thirties with dark brown hair cut into a severely stylish bob. Red lipstick, secretary glasses on her eyes—the cat-eyed kind, a yellow jeweled tunic over white capri pants. Sophisticated. Older. And she obviously knew Mateo.

And suddenly I couldn’t breathe. This could not be good.

Before Mateo could say anything—he was, in fact, too stunned to speak—she put one hand on her hip and cocked her head, eying us both with a manipulative gleam, the disbelief having worn off. She pointed at me and looked at Mateo. “Mateo, no creo que esta es tu esposa.”

I understood esposa. That meant wife.

“Sonia,” he said, finding his voice. He cleared his throat. He looked down at me and I saw absolute fear in his eyes. It rocked my foundation. “Vera, this is Sonia. I have known her for a long time. She moved to Paris. I did not know she was back in Madrid.” He stressed these words to let me know that this chick did not know about the divorce; at least that’s what I got out of it.

Oh, this so did not look good. Now I was blushing with shame, like a flaming tomato. I had to get out of there.

I nodded at her and gave her a quick smile which she did not return. “Nice to meet you,” I said. I brushed past her and shot Mateo an apologetic look over my shoulder. “I need to get some air.”

I made my way out of the bathroom and bar and into the night air. A certain chill had settled in it, despite the heat of the day.

Summer was ending sooner than I thought.

The next day was Sunday and a day that Mateo thought I should finally meet his little Chloe Ann. I was extremely nervous, especially with what had happened with Sonia at the bar. After I had gone outside, Mateo explained to his friend that he and Isabel were divorcing. He didn’t say anything about me, I guess that was pretty explanatory. And even though Sonia had been his friend—an ex-girlfriend of one of his buddies—and not Isabel’s, he said he could feel the hate coming off of her.

It definitely put a damper on the evening and made me realize with a kick to the gut that we couldn’t be a normal couple, not yet anyway. We were hanging around fun restaurants and bars not just because of me, but because he didn’t want to run into people like Sonia. Claudia and Ricardo were the first friends we’d met in a long time, I hadn’t seen his parents yet, and it seemed like there was an awful lot of hiding going on.

When I brought the subject up over our hung over breakfast, the feeling that our relationship was as sequestered as it had ever been, he told me that he’d go pick up Chloe Ann and we could take her to the zoo, one of her favorite places.

He called up Isabel and I listened to their conversation blatantly, mainly because I didn’t understand any of it. There were a few tense moments, the heel of Mateo’s hand pressed to his forehead, his eyes squeezed shut. Finally, it seemed she acquiesced and he let out a sigh of relief.

I, however, was a bundle of raw nerves. This was his daughter we were talking about. And I knew she had no idea who I was. Mateo had told me that though Isabel knew there was another woman he met at Las Palabras, she didn’t know I was here, living with him, so Chloe Ann definitely didn’t know about me.

“What are you going to say to her?” I asked later as he was grabbing his keys off the hook on the wall, about to leave. “Who will you tell Chloe Ann I am?”

He gave me a soft look. “I will tell her you are a friend of mine from another country, Canada, and that you are very nice.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat and folded my arms. “That’s it? I mean, don’t you think she’ll tell Isabel about me? Don’t you think that maybe you should tell her about me anyway? I mean, the thing with Sonia…it’ll happen again, don’t you think?”

He nodded and exhaled, his shoulders slumping slightly. He looked defeated. He stared at his feet for a moment before he looked back at me, a quiet desperation on his brow. “Vera, I just want you to see Chloe Ann. I want her to see you. You’re the most important girls in my life. So…I will ask a favor from you. Will you do me a favor?”

I couldn’t say no to him. “What?”

“Today, when I bring her back here, can you cover up your tattoos? Put your hair up. And I will call you Estrella.”

I felt my stomach freefall. I frowned, feeling disturbed. “You want me to hide who I am? Pretend to be someone else?”

His lips curved into a sympathetic smile. “No, Vera. Just…you are so lovely, so full of life. You’re distinctive. You’re right, I need to tell Isabel about you. But I also want you to see Chloe Ann, and I don’t want Isabel to hear it from her.”

“I don’t think I like this.”

“Please? Just this once.”

“She’ll still probably say she met Daddy’s friend Estrella, what’s the difference?”

“Please.”

I sighed, running my hand through my hair in frustration. “Fine.”

He came over and held me tight, a quick embrace. “Thank you. I’ll be back soon.”

And then he left.

I leaned back against the hallway wall, my legs splayed in front of me, barely keeping me up. This was getting so complicated, and it would only continue to be complicated until…well, I didn’t know when it would end. Things never got tidied up the minute a couple got divorced. It seemed, from what I’d seen, that the divorce itself was the easiest part and all the real shit is what came afterward, shit that went on for years.

And then I understood why Mateo wanted to keep me so hidden, so under wraps. Lucia had said that being with me wouldn’t reflect poorly on him to a judge, and while that may or may not be true, it obviously wasn’t what Mateo thought. He feared that if Isabel knew I was living with him, that it would affect his chances of getting joint custody of Chloe Ann. And I knew that if I was just some other woman, it probably wouldn’t be as much of a problem.

But I was me. I had all the tattoos, the piercings, the way I dressed, the way I was, the fact that I was fifteen years younger. I was sure that Isabel could spin me into anything she wanted; all she’d have to do was point to me and call me dangerous, a delinquent, a threat to her child.

For the first time in my entire life, I felt a cut of regret at all my tattoos.

But Mateo loves you for you, I told myself. Because of all those things that make you who you are.

I knew I was right. I knew that had I been someone else, someone older, no ink, someone prudish and classy and demure, that Mateo wouldn’t have fallen in love.

It was just such a shame that the reasons Mateo fell in love with me were the very same ones that could be used to rip his life apart.

With that heaviness weighing down on my heart, I went into the bedroom and changed into skinny jeans and my Freddie Mercury long-sleeved tee. I brushed my hair back and knotted it in a bun at the back. I took my dark eye makeup down a touch, but unfortunately that only highlighted my age. There was really nothing that could be done about that. Thankfully to a five-year-old, every adult looked the same—old.