His translator. She and I met a week earlier; Matías invited me to her birthday party, told me he thought we would really get along. “So glad you could make it,” she’d said when we arrived, offering a tight smile, then looking to him. The look she’d given him suggested that she didn’t know he was bringing me, and was surprised that he had. When he excused himself to chat with another visiting writer, he pressed his hand to her shoulder, which wasn’t particularly troubling—he was rather indiscriminately effusive. But still. I noticed it. When it was just the two of us left standing there, I asked her where she’d learned Spanish. “Oh, everywhere,” she said. “I just got back from two years in Argentina, before that I was in Madrid.” I felt slight envy at this, given that I was living in Iowa.

“Claire’s traveling early tomorrow to Mexico City,” he says to me now. “She needed to ask me a few questions about a translation.”

“At three in the morning?”

“I know, it’s weird,” he says. “She works nonstop. She’s very American in that way.” He laughs a little, then pets the top of my head. “I’m so sorry it woke you, mi amor.” He kisses my cheek and I lie back down. I still can’t shake a feeling of fear. He touches his lips to my neck. He places his hand beneath my nightgown, and I pretend that I’m already asleep.

Several days later, we are on our way to catch a flight for an impromptu trip to New York that Matías suggested and bought tickets for, and that I’ve been hesitant about. It seems hasty and extreme, and the impulsivity of it makes me worry. “Why the sudden need to travel?” I ask.

“Because,” he says, “why not? It’ll be great to explore the city with you.” I am not so sure I need spontaneity right now, and I certainly am not ready to visit New York yet—I only just left a month ago. But against my better judgment, I agree to go, not wanting to seem boring or uptight.

“I did something silly last night,” he tells me in the car on the way to the airport. “I kissed someone.”

“You what?” I press the break unintentionally and the car jolts to a stop on the empty highway. He throws his arm out across my chest. I look in the rearview mirror, then at him. “Who?”

“Claire,” he says as the odometer creeps back up to seventy. “Does that bother you?”

I feel my chest heaving, like I’ve been punched in the stomach and can’t breathe. “Of course it bothers me!”