Excerpt:

The Wedding Day

The fork scraped against the plate without picking up a thing. Mateo pushed the scrambled eggs back and forth, building small yellow mounds only to flatten them again with slow, mechanical movements. The toast sat untouched beside his coffee, which had long since gone cold.

“You haven’t eaten a single bite,” his mother said, watching him from across the table. Her son’s pallor unnerved her—it was a weariness that seemed to reach far deeper than the surface.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Mateo, honey—” she began, but she cut herself short when she caught her husband’s warning glance.

The father folded the newspaper with deliberate slowness and set it on the table. He removed his glasses and wiped them with the hem of his shirt, a nervous tic he defaulted to when he had something difficult to say.

“I heard you last night,” he finally said, his eyes fixed elsewhere. “You left after two in the morning. I heard the garage door, the engine. You didn’t get back until nearly dawn.”

Mateo continued to rearrange the food on his plate as if he hadn’t heard a word.

“I know you’ve been going through a rough time,” the father continued, weighing each word with care, “but you need to rest, son. You need to pull yourself together. Your cousin Rebeca’s wedding is this afternoon, and the whole family is expected to be there. Your Aunt Maria asked after you specifically yesterday. It would be… conspicuous if you weren’t there.”

Mateo slowly looked up. Dark hollows—sunken caverns—haunted the skin beneath his eyelids, but his gaze burned with a strange, unsettling lucidity. There was something in that look: an unnatural serenity, the chilling calm of someone who has just made an irrevocable decision.

“I’m not going to the wedding,” he said, his voice flat. “Rebeca won’t be getting married anyway.”

A heavy silence settled in the kitchen. The wall clock kept up its incessant tick-tock. Outside, a dog barked in the distance. The mother exchanged a worried glance with her husband—one of those looks long-married couples share when they harbor the same unspoken fear.

“Mateo,” the mother said, setting her cup down and pulling her chair closer. “My love, I know this is hard. You two were together for years, ever since high school. You grew up together. I understand that seeing her marry someone else must be painful.”

“You have to leave the past behind,” the father interrupted, his voice firmer than he intended. He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on the table. “Rebeca made her choice. She’s marrying Javier—a promising young man with a good career ahead of him. She’s starting a new life, Mateo. And you must do the same. You have to move on.”

“I still love her.”

Mateo gripped his fork so hard his knuckles turned white. The stillness of his body, the way he stared at an invisible point on the wall, made the temperature in the kitchen seem to drop.

“And she loves me,” he continued with a conviction that turned the blood cold. “She loves me. Not him. Never him.”

“Son, please.” His mother’s voice cracked. She reached a hand toward him but stopped halfway, as if suddenly afraid to touch him. “You have to face reality. Rebeca chose to marry Javier. She chose him. It hurts, I know—it’s unfair after everything you shared—but you have to accept it.”

“Reality?” Mateo let out a short, bitter laugh. It was a hollow, echoing sound, as if it were coming from a great distance. “The reality is that Rebeca and I love each other. We always have. We were fifteen when it all started. That afternoon in the park, remember? You were the ones who said we were the perfect couple.”

“That was a long time ago,” the father said, his tone vacillating between gentleness and desperation. “Things change. People evolve. Rebeca moved on. You have to, too.”

“Nothing has changed,” Mateo interrupted. There was a finality in his voice, something absolute—the tone of a man speaking of a finished fact. “Between Rebeca and me, everything is exactly the same. She knows it now. She understands.”

A shiver raced down the mother’s spine at those words. She knows it now. What did that mean? What had her son done in those early hours of the morning?

The father was about to respond, to insist once more that his son accept the inevitable, when the sound of an engine cut through the conversation. All three turned toward the kitchen window.

A police cruiser pulled up in front of the house, its black-and-white paint reflecting the morning light like a mirror. Its lights weren’t flashing, but its presence was no less ominous. Two officers stepped out with precise, efficient movements. One of them carried a folder under his arm. They began to walk toward the front door, their boots rhythmic against the pavement.

“What could the police want?” the mother whispered, pressing a hand to her chest. Her voice was trembling. “Did something happen in the neighborhood?”

Mateo stood up. The movement was slow, deliberate—the movement of someone who had been waiting for this moment for hours, perhaps since the moment he walked through the door at dawn.

He walked toward the entrance with a calm that froze his parents’ hearts. His shoulders were relaxed; his step was firm. There was no fear, not even surprise. Only a kind of relief, as if he could finally set down an invisible weight…

…"

–Continue reading in its original Castilian language at https://fictograma.com/ , an open source community of Spanish writers–