The message was simple, but heavy.

“I don’t want to go on. I want to become a man who deserves you again.”

My chest tightened so fast that I thought I might pass out.

Sofia was not just any woman.

She was my ex-wife.

The woman I married when I was 29.

The woman who left this same house three years ago, when she was 32, because loving me was breaking her heart.

My name is Diego Herrera. I am 37 years old. I am a civil engineer specializing in bridges and roads.

My job is to design and supervise bridges that cross rivers, roads and highways around the state of Jalisco.

But somehow, I couldn’t keep standing the one bridge that really mattered in my life.

Sofia is 35 years old. He is a physiotherapist.

He spends his days helping people who have suffered accidents, surgeries, or injuries learn to walk again.

Fix what’s broken in other people’s bodies.

But when we were married, I never realized that her heart was what was slowly breaking.

We have been divorced for three years.

Three long years.

Three careful years.

Three years educated to the point of pain.

We send each other messages on our birthdays.

Sometimes we meet at the barbecues of mutual friends.

We return containers of food to each other like two strangers who once shared a life.

We smile.

We keep everything safe.

We never talked about what really happened.

And now… She had read the only honest thing I’ve said in years.

I didn’t even intend to send it to him.

Mateo had been writing to me for more than an hour before that.

She had sent me a photo of her newborn daughter sleeping on her chest, wrapped in a small cream-colored blanket.

I congratulated him again.

He told me to stop hiding behind the word “congratulations.”

He said that he had been congratulating him for two weeks just to avoid talking about myself.

That’s Matthew.

You can turn a baby photo into a therapy session in three messages.

He asked me if I was dating anyone.

I told him no.

He asked me why.

I told him that work was very busy.

He answered me with a single word:

“Liar.”

Then he started to put more pressure on me.

It reminded me of the roast meat at Ivan’s house last month.

He said he saw me staring at Sofia for almost two hours straight.

He said he looked like a man standing in front of the door of a house he used to live in.

I didn’t respond for a long time.

But Mateo does not let silence win.

He told me to just say it.

To say the thing that I’ve been drowning in my chest for three years.

That I would say it so that it would stop devouring me inside.

Something on that night finally broke inside me.

The house was too quiet.

The air felt heavy.

I was tired of pretending I was fine.

So I wrote the most sincere words I’ve ever written in my life.

She was the only person who made my life feel like more than just flats, concrete, and steel beams.

He didn’t just love her.

He loved who I was when I was by his side.

I wanted to go back to every door she had stood at and this time look up like I should have done from the beginning.

I don’t want to go any further.

I want to deserve you again.

That’s all I want.

I hit send.

I put the phone down on the living room table and covered my eyes with my hands.

I felt as if I had finally exhaled after holding my breath for years.

Then something made me look at the screen again.

The name at the top of the conversation was not Matthew.

It was Sofia.

The air came out of my lungs.

My hands were shaking so much that I almost dropped the phone.

I saw how the message changed from delivered to read.

Every second felt like a whole minute.

My mouth went dry.

The room seemed to tilt slightly.

I tried to write a correction.

“I’m sorry, I got the wrong person.”

I deleted it.

“That message wasn’t for you.”

I also deleted it.

“Please ignore him.”

I deleted it again.

Every excuse sounded like a cowardly lie.

Because that message was the only honest thing he had said since the day she left this house.

Then the three dots appeared on his side of the conversation