“Have your things out by Sunday. My girlfriend is pregnant, and we’re raising our baby here.”

My husband said it from the sofa.

The gray linen sofa I’d bought six years ago with my own savings, after three months of looking at fabric samples. The sofa I’d fallen asleep on more nights than I could count, waiting for him to come home.

The woman he was leaving me for was sitting right next to him on it.

After twenty years of marriage, Sergio Vargas was giving me a deadline to get out of my own home.

I was standing in the doorway of the living room with my purse still on my shoulder. I’d just come home from work. I hadn’t even taken off my shoes.

I’d seen them through the glass of the front door before I came in. Sergio and a young woman, sitting close together on my sofa. I’d thought, for one confused second, that she was a client. A coworker. Someone from his office.

Then I came in, and he said it.

My girlfriend is pregnant.

My name is Elena Morales. I was forty-six years old that afternoon.

For twelve of my twenty years with Sergio, we tried to have a child.

Twelve years.

He knew everything about those years. He knew about the appointments. The specialists in Guadalajara and then in Mexico City. The blood tests every morning for weeks at a time. The hormone injections I gave myself in the stomach, in our bathroom, while he held the little sharps container and looked away.

He knew about the procedures. Three rounds of IVF. The money. The waiting. The phone calls from the clinic.

He knew about the two times I got pregnant and lost it. Once at eight weeks. Once at eleven.

He knew about the nights I locked myself in the bathroom and turned on the shower so he wouldn’t hear me crying. He knew, because sometimes he’d knock on the door and say, “Elena? You okay?” And I’d say, “I’m fine,” and he’d go back to bed.

He knew all of it.

And now he was telling me to leave so somebody else could raise a baby in the home I’d paid for.

The woman sitting next to him looked about twenty-seven.

She was pretty. Long dark hair, very straight, very shiny. A cream-colored blouse. Gold hoop earrings. She had one hand resting on her stomach. There was nothing to see yet. She just kept her hand there. Like she wanted to make sure I saw it.

She looked around my living room while I stood there. At the bookshelves. At the big windows that looked out over the jacaranda trees on the street below. At the framed photographs on the wall.

Our apartment was on the eighth floor of a building in Providencia, one of the nicest neighborhoods in Guadalajara. Three bedrooms. Two bathrooms. A balcony full of plants. A doorman downstairs named Don Chuy who’d worked there longer than I had.

She was looking at it the way you look at a house you’re thinking of buying.