Episode 4

Robert

Ice clinks against the glass as I swirl the whiskey tumbler between my fingers. The dim light of the office bounces off the liquid amber, but my attention is fixed on something else: the screen in front of me.

The woman who appeared a week ago at the gym as if she had been thrown into the middle of a stage that didn't belong to her. I remember the moment with absurd clarity: the metallic noise of the weights, the murmur of other people's conversations, and suddenly, her. Her movements, clumsy but determined, demanded my gaze without asking permission. An intruder who didn't seem to fit in, and perhaps that's why I couldn't stop watching her.

Now her image stares at me from the monitor. Olive skin, brown hair with bright highlights under the artificial light of the gym, and those eyes... chocolate, dark, with an almost hypnotic glimmer. A look that, without meaning to, follows me everywhere.

Investigating her was inevitable. There is no mystery that I cannot unravel if I set my mind to it. Her name, her address, her job. Everything I found confirmed my instinct: she doesn't belong in my world. There are no weighty surnames behind her, no inherited riches, no last name that opens doors. Just a common job, a salary that would barely be enough to afford a gym like that. And yet, there she was, moving between machines and mirrors as if she knew someone was watching her. As if she wanted to be watched.

I lean towards the screen, carefully observing the photograph that I managed to obtain from one of the security cameras. She is not smiling, but there is something in the curve of her lips that suggests she could do so in a dangerous way.

Then I hear the knocking on the door. A second later, Stefan appears.

I gulp down the rest of the whiskey in one sip, letting the burn go down my throat.

"What do you want?" I ask, without taking my eyes off the screen.

"Hi, Dad," His tone has a nervous edge, I notice it in the way he plays with the keys in his hand. He was always an insecure boy.

When he was born I was just a seventeen-year-old boy, I had to become a man so I could also do it with him

I watch him out of the corner of my eye, waiting for him to decide to drop what brings him here.

"I wanted to tell you..." He coughs to clear his throat. "I've invited Mom to dinner tonight."

The word "Mom" falls like poison on my ears. I straighten my back and finally turn to look at him.

"You did what?"

"Carla suggested it to me," he replies quickly, as if naming his fiancee was a shield. "We thought it would be good... you know, for the four of us to get together. Maybe... settle the differences, now that I'm getting married."

My humor vanishes completely. That woman. My ex-wife. The last person in this world I want to share a table with. Stefan doesn't understand —or refuses to understand— that the past is behind us, buried under layers of resentment that I don't intend to remove.

I turn off the computer abruptly, the woman's image disappears in a flash, leaving me with an emptiness that irritates me even more. I drop the whiskey glass on the desk with a thud.

"I'm not interested," I say sharply. "Wherever your mother is, I don't plan to be."

"Dad, please, just listen to me..."

I'm already getting to my feet. I take the jacket that rests on the back of the chair and arrange it on my shoulders. The knot of rage tightens my stomach.

I walk past my son without stopping. He looks at me with a plea that I ignore. I'm not in the mood to put up with his pathetic attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable.

The door closes behind me with a firm slam. I prefer the night air, cold and free, to being locked in a conversation that should never have started.

As I go down the stairs and leave the house, the image returns, insistent, to my mind: a dark-eyed woman, an intruder in my world, who seems custom-made to upset my balance. And, against all logic, I smile slightly as I remember her, because I'm dying to have those eyes in front of me again.

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