“Okayyyyy,” Renata says as Thomas sits beside her nodding solemnly. Now that he’s finally committed, Thomas has taken on the distinct responsibility and conviction of a former player, called upon to fight on behalf of all women who’ve suffered at the hands of his abandoned ilk.

Over drinks that night, they ask me to hash out the events of the past few months, how I came to find out that Matías had been cheating on me for the majority of our relationship. As I retell the story, I feel a renewed sense of shock, and I’m humiliated by the depth of his lies. I chew an ice cube from my vodka soda as the three of us go through his emails, the ones he sent begging me to see him one more time, emails with pictures of newborn babies attached.

“Since you’re craving kids right now,” Matías wrote, “here’s a picture of me holding my son when he was only a month old.”

“You fell for this?” Thomas asks, seeming genuinely disappointed, and possibly ashamed. Maybe it reminds of his own past tactics. By the end of the night I am intoxicated enough to see things clearly. And to realize that I’m not going anywhere.

I tell Matías this in an email, that I no longer want to go to Buenos Aires, that I don’t want to continue on with him at all. “It’s just too much,” I write. “Too much to try and move past.”

I wake up the next morning to a deluge of missed calls and emails. “At least tell me this to my face, over Skype,” he writes. “Breaking up over email is like spitting on everything we’ve had.”

I want to point out that he already did that by sleeping with someone else the entire time we were together. Instead, I sign on to Skype and accept his call. He sits on the other end, a lit cigarette resting in the ashtray beside his computer, his lips contorted into a forced pout. “Baby, what’s going on?” he asks, cocking his head to the side like a confused monkey. “Come on, talk to me.”

As I try to explain myself, staring into his eyes encircled by dark planetary rings of sadness and experience, my resolve begins to weaken.

“I just think if this going to work, we need to move a little slower,” I say, completely reneging on my stance from the night before.

He nods. “I see. Well, since you won’t come here—he pauses, swallows audibly and takes a deep, dramatic breath—“I’ll come to you. Once the academic quarter ends in late January. I have a month off, and we can spend it together.”

“I need to move on, Matías. I can’t keep—”

“Just think about it,” he interrupts. “That’s all I’m asking.”