I nod in fake agreement. I can’t help but feel that Matías is sincere this time, that he wouldn’t risk losing me twice. The reward for both parties is just too great: four weeks together in a freezing Midwest winter, the perfect measure of his determination and commitment, at the end of which I’ll leave school and accompany him back to Buenos Aires, just in time for spring. Once there I’ll write and teach at the American university.

“Chances are you’ll be working the register at the neighborhood supermarket,” Renata chimes in without looking up from her textbook. “Do not quit school, trust me, you’ll regret it.”

“I end up regretting most of my decisions,” I respond. “So I guess I’m doomed either way.”

Matías and I discuss the possibility that it might not work out, that our relationship might always be haunted by “the hell,” as he’s come to term the cheating months, as if he’d been assigned to his infidelity and had no control over it. He might never succeed in fully restoring my faith in him, and my resentment and mistrust might be too great to overcome. He assures me that doubt is an inevitable, even necessary, component of any relationship, and that any love worth pursuing entails risk—some more than others. Though we bicker over the specifics, we both agree that the wager is worth making. And so I spend my time counting down until his visit, running diagonal lines through the squares on my calendar as the months turn to weeks, and, eventually, days.

But as his arrival approaches, something unexpected takes hold. A phenomenon in which he begins to appear smaller. Less exciting. A little pathetic, even. Just like with others who came before, I’ve crystallized an illusion of Matías that’s composed of an initial fantasy and the filter of distance. Yet this time, the illusion doesn’t hold up. Ever so slowly, it begins to disintegrate.

As it does so, practical concerns began to seep in. I make an appointment at the local clinic to get tested for everything he might’ve given me, which in a turn of luck is nothing. I sit on the edge of the examination table, feet crossed at the ankles, feeling I might shatter if even the nurse touches me. I tell her about him. “Could you be pregnant?” she asks.

I shake my head and feel an ache in my chest. “I don’t think so.”

“Did he use protection?”

“Not always,” I tell the nurse.

Finally, just two days before Matías is supposed to fly here, I muster up the strength to tell him that I’ve changed my mind about us, that I don’t want him to return.

“I don’t get it,” he says. “You’re saying you feel differently than you did just last week?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”