Page 4 of Shattered Hearts

Mama holds my hand. I know she's not in agreement with us being in court. I've had to wait nine months to be officially separated from him, before I could petition a divorce. There are things I love and hate about Spain, one of them is the fact that they believe so much in tradition. Divorce is deemed to be the last resort. Maybe it would have been if he’d only just had an affair.

I’m in court, wearing a navy dress that I bought in Toledo three months ago from a woman who makes her own clothes and sells them from her front door. It has a collar and three buttons at the top and falls just below the knee. Professional. Composed. Nothing about it says I spent forty minutes this morning sitting on the bathroom floor trying to remember how to breathe.

The courthouse has stone walls, and high ceilings. The kind of place that was built to make you feel small and remind you that whatever you came here to do is permanent. I feel it the moment we walk through the heavy wooden doors. Something settling over my shoulders like a coat I didn't ask to wear.

"You can always change your mind," Mama says.

She moves an imaginary strand of hair from my face. I let her. It's easier than arguing.

"Your father cheat on me. I still with him,” Mama says in her broken English.

I know. She's told me so many times that the words have stopped landing the way she intends them to. Her argument is that my generation doesn't have values like hers. That any little thing like your husband cheating and fathering a child outside of your marriage isn't a great deal. Not when he comes home to you every night. I cannot wrap my head around it. It's as if everything I've ever known and loved has been a lie, and she's standing in the rubble telling me the house was fine, it just needed a little air.

I don't admire my parents the way I used to.

When we were younger, Jorge and I spent so much time with my family. Not his. Not when we never knew if his dad would be sober or not. As we got older we stopped pretending otherwise. His dad was never sober.

But my parents. They were the golden couple. The type that everyone including myself aspired to be like. Mama cleaned the house, looked after the kids and as we all grew up and left home she turned her energy outward, helping anyone in financial need, anyone injured or widowed or simply unable to manage on their own. She was the kind of woman the village built itself around without ever saying so out loud.

Now, in this past year of silence and distance and too much time alone with my own thoughts in the cabin in Toledo, I've been learning that she had her heart broken too more than once by Dad. And underneath all of it she did what was expected of her and she carried on her duties hiding her emotions. She never thought of divorce. Never wanted one. She folded the hurt into herself like a letter she decided never to send and got on with living.

Blanca, my sister who is just a little older than me, she claims that dad’s extracurricular activities were always clear. Whereas I never noticed, because I was too busy worshipping him. The late nights, he would spend in the office and Dad was the great lawyer, the only one on our street who didn't own a bar or work the farm. He was treated like something close to a god because he'd been to university. It was the thing I wanted for myself too as I got older. I wanted to be admired, looked up to, to carry that same quiet authority he had when he walked into a room. No one would doubt him if he contradicted them. No one would dare question him even if he was wrong.

It was the kind of power I craved.

And I gave it up when I fell in love with Jorge at fourteen years old in a village where everybody knew everybody and falling in love with a boy in the village felt like the most natural thing in the world.

I threw it away. I gave up my dreams and I did it willingly, which is the part that keeps me up at three in the morning in a cabin surrounded by olive trees with no television and no wifi and nothing but my own thoughts for company. I gave up a part of myself too. I used to love learning. I used to sit up reading until my eyes burned and fall asleep with a book on my chest and wake up already thinking about the next chapter. The only thing I'd been dedicating that same energy to in the two years we were married was how to get pregnant.

I'd traded a law degree to watch football matches and clean football boots, then IVF appointments to have the family we craved.

I sit in the hard wooden seat beside my cousin Diego, who is representing me today. Blanca wanted to do it herself, but I didn't want her in that chair. I didn't want someone who loves me watching my face while the details of my marriage get laid out on a courtroom table like evidence at a crime scene.

Diego is good. He's calm and thorough and doesn't look at me with pity.

That matters more than I can say.

My family are arranged on the bench behind me. Mama on my left, Dad beside her looking uncomfortable in his suit, Blanca with her arms folded and her jaw set, my brother Pedro who has been suspiciously sober since this morning, and a collection of aunts and cousins who came because that is simply what we do. We show up. Even when we don't know what to say. Even when there's nothing to say.

I won’t cry.

I turn to face the doors at the back of the courtroom and that's when I see his family entering.

I knew he'd be with them. Of course I knew. But knowing a thing and seeing it are two entirely different experiences and for a moment my mind goes completely blank, the way it does when you step off a kerb you didn't see coming.

His brothers first. Then his mother, small and straight-backed in black, who once told me I was the best thing that ever happened to her son and who I haven't spoken to in a year. Then Belen, who catches my eye from across the court room and gives me the smallest nod, the kind that says I know, I see you, hold on, all at once.

And then Jorge.

One year today. His birthday.

He's going to get the gift he deserves.

He looks terrible. That's the thing nobody tells you, that seeing it doesn't make it satisfying the way you imagine it will. Bloodshot eyes, hair pushed back but not deliberately, just out of the way. He's wearing a dark suit, charcoal, well cut, but it can't do what he needs it to do today. The man who wouldn't leave the house for a supermarket run unless he looked like he had somewhere more important to be, standing in front of a judge looking like something the village had decided to return.

I face forward.

I won’t cry.