When My Husband Praised His Ex in Public, I Booked a Photo Shoot and Changed Everything

Part 2 …

I could see the name.

Fernanda.

Of course it was Fernanda.

The message appeared only for a second, but an offended woman reads faster than the public prosecutor’s office in payweek.

“Has she seen it? I told you she was going to react. Don’t get me into your problems, Ricardo.”

I looked at him.

He placed his cell phone face down on the table, as if he had buried a body.

“Who was it?” I asked.

“Of work.

“Strange. At your job now everyone is called Fernanda.

His face hardened.

“Don’t touch my cell phone.

“I didn’t move. Your guilt that lit up the screen by itself.”

Ricardo got up from his chair and started to walk from one side to the other, with that energy of a cornered man who tries to look indignant before looking guilty.

– Look, she wrote me yes. So what? You posted a photo teasing everyone.

“I posted a picture of myself.

“With that sentence.”

“With my face.”

“To make me feel bad.

I looked slowly.

– Ricardo, you commented “beautiful” on your ex’s photo. If someone is making you feel bad, it’s you with the internet included.

He ran his hand through his hair.

“It wasn’t for that much.

That sentence.

It wasn’t that much.

They use it for everything. For lies, for humiliation, for a hand that stays too long where it shouldn’t, for an absence disguised as tiredness. Men like Ricardo always have a special scale where what they do weighs little and what we feel weighs tons.

“Then don’t worry,” I said. Mine wasn’t that much either.

I went to the room.

I didn’t slam doors.

I didn’t cry.

I took off my earrings in front of the mirror and looked at myself like someone who stares at a house after an earthquake: looking for cracks, not ruins.

Ricardo stayed in the room, talking quietly on the phone. I didn’t hear everything, but I heard my name, the word “ridiculous” and a laugh that wasn’t his.

It was hers.

That’s when I remembered something I hadn’t told.

Before posting my photo, I had sent a message to Fernanda.

Not from a fake account. Not with insults. Not with threats.

I sent it directly:

“Hi, Fernanda. I saw Ricardo’s comment. Tomorrow I’m going to do one in São Paulo, in Vila Madalena. You’re invited. I want to know if the problem is you, him or the version of me he told you.”

I thought she wouldn’t answer.

He answered in two minutes.

“I will.”

That’s what Ricardo didn’t know.

The next day I woke up before him. I made brewed coffee, dressed up with jeans, a white shirt and sunglasses even with the sky closed. São Paulo woke up in his own way: buses passing by, horns, mate sellers screaming on the beach, and people running as if they were always late for something.

Ricardo left the room with dark circles under his eyes.

“We need to talk.

“Yes,” I said. But not here.

“What do you mean not here?”

“In a public place. Where you stop acting.

He didn’t like it.

But it was.

I made an appointment at the Municipal Market of São Paulo. Not by chance. Between pastel stalls, the smell of sugarcane juice, loud music and people shouting price, no one can fake elegance for long. The truth appears best where life makes noise.

Ricardo arrived angry.

“Why here?”

“Because here they sell food, confusion and sincerity by the kilo. Maybe you’ll learn something.

I sat at a cafeteria table. I ordered natural guarana and a cheese pastry. Ricardo didn’t ask for anything.

Five minutes later, Fernanda appeared.

It wasn’t like in the beach photos.

Hair up, sneakers, simple clothes and the face of someone who had not slept properly either. When Ricardo saw it, he got up so fast that he almost knocked over his chair.

“What are you doing here?”

Fernanda looked at me.

“She invited me.

Ricardo turned pale.

“What are you doing?”

“Something you don’t know how to do,” I replied. Speak head-on.

Fernanda sat down without asking permission. He put his cell phone on the table.

“I came because I’m tired.

Ricardo gritted his teeth.

“Fernanda, don’t put on a show.

She let out a dry laugh.

“Show?” Ricardo, you wrote to me after two years without talking to me. He said that your marriage was dead, that your wife treated you like furniture, that you just wanted to feel seen.

I felt a punch in the chest.

Not because I was surprised.

But because a part of me still wanted him to have limits.

“Did you say that?” I asked.

Ricardo didn’t look at me.

“I was angry.

Fernanda unlocked her cell phone.

“I also said that she was careless, that she doesn’t dress up anymore, that you were ashamed to go out with her because she’s always tired.”

I felt that the hibiscus water turned into an iron in my mouth.

I was tired, yes.

Tired of paying half of everything, ironing shirts that he said he couldn’t find, remembering his family’s birthday, washing dishes after dinners where he shone and I collected. Tired of hearing that I was “intense” for asking for the minimum.

“Go on,” I said.

Ricardo tapped his fingers on the table.

“Enough is enough.”

Fernanda didn’t stop.

“Then he started commenting on my photos. I told him not to get into trouble. He said that you never noticed anything.

I laughed.

Low.

Dangerous.

“How curious.” I spent my life thinking I couldn’t see anything… And it was just tired of explaining what I saw.

Ricardo leaned towards me.

“Do you want to destroy our marriage for a comment?”

“No, love. You destroyed with years of feeling single when it suited you and married when you needed hot food.

Fernanda lowered her gaze.

“I didn’t come to take anything from you,” she said. Seriously. I thought you were emotionally separated. That’s what he told me.

“You don’t need to explain anything to me,” I replied. You’re not my husband.

Ricardo let out a bitter laugh.

“How beautiful.” Now you have become friends.

“No,” said Fernanda. Now I’m just making it clear that the problem is you.

The lady from the cafeteria looked at us. A man drinking broth too. Even the boy in the orange stopped for a second. Ricardo noticed the audience and lowered his voice.

“Let’s go home.”

“No.

“I said, let’s go.”

“And I said no.”

It was the first time in a long time that this “no” came out without a tremor.

Ricardo looked at me as if he was seeing me for the first time. And maybe he was. Perhaps he had never seen the woman who existed below the wife who solved everything.

I took a briefcase out of my bag.

He frowned.

“What’s that?”

—Bank statements, rent receipts, payment receipts, and the apartment contract.

“What for?”

“To remind you of something.” The apartment is in the name of the two. But I paid for the entrance. The main furniture was bought by me. The card you used for the trip to Cancun, where you followed Fernanda again, is in my name.

Fernanda widened her eyes.

Richard whispered:

“Don’t do that here.”

“Why?” Are you ashamed to show that your masculinity is funded?

He stood up.

“You’re crazy.

There it was.

The final word when the arguments are over.

Crazy.

Intense.

Exaggerated.

Dramatic.

The four horsemen of the male apocalypse.

I also stood up.

“No, Ricardo. It would be crazy to keep diminishing me for you to feel big.

I grabbed my bag.

Fernanda stood up with me.

Ricardo looked at her.

“You don’t get involved.”

She stared at him fearlessly.

“You’ve already messed me up when you used my name to humiliate her.”

We left the market.

Outside, Pinheiros breathed with its old trees, beautiful facades, cafes full of people working on laptops and broken sidewalks reminding us that even the elegant stumbles. We walked to Roosevelt Square, where the replica of the David seemed to observe everything with Renaissance judgment.

Fernanda stopped in front of a rosewood.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I looked at her.

“Don’t apologize for him.” Apologize to yourself if you ever believed him.

His eyes filled.

“I believed him because he also spoke beautifully when I was alone.

Absent.

How sad to realize that you don’t compete with another woman.

Sometimes you compete with the lie that one man sells to everyone.

I went back to the apartment alone.

Ricardo arrived two hours later.

With flowers.

Red roses from the market, still with a label.

“Love,” he said from the door. I thought things through.

I stared at him.

There was something almost comical about that scene: the man I didn’t know how to respect trying to buy forgiveness with a plastic bouquet.

“And what did you think?”

“It just got out of hand,” he said.

“No. It got out of his control.

He entered the room and left the flowers on the table.

“I love you.”

Before, those three words would have taken me apart.

That night they sounded like an expired password.

“What do you love, Ricardo?” Me? Or the woman who washed away your guilt, defended you with her mother, believed you were tired while you flirted and still felt wrong for complaining?

His face hardened.

“I also put up with things.

“Tell me one.”

Silence.

“Exactly.

I went to the closet and pulled out a suitcase. Not great. Enough for clothes, documents, my good earrings and the blouse from the photo shoot. Ricardo followed me.

“Now you’re leaving?”

“No. You are the one who goes.

He laughed incredulously.

“How?”

“The contract is in the name of both of them, but I spoke to the administrator. You have fifteen days for an agreement or you leave today with borrowed dignity. You choose.

“You can’t kick me out.”

“You couldn’t humiliate me in public either, and look at that… succeeded.

His cell phone vibrated again.

This time he didn’t hide it.

He turned angrily.

It was his mother.

“You’ve told you everything,” he said.

“No. But your cousin follows me on Instagram. Your family has eyes, it just takes time to use them.

He did not answer.

Another cell phone vibrated.

Then another.

Message from his brother:

“Is it true that you were with your ex? The mother is crying.”

I almost felt sorry.

Almost.

But I remembered the “beautiful” shining in another woman’s photo as I ate sweatshirt cheese bread, still believing in marriage.

Ricardo sat on the bed.

“It was just ego,” he said quietly. I just wanted to feel like I could still be desired.

It hurt.

Because it was true.

“And what do I do?” I asked. The appliance that clapped in the kitchen?

“Don’t talk like that.”

“Then you don’t live like that.

He began to cry.

Not loud.

Just enough to try to pull me back.

But I had been out for a long time.

“I’ll ask you something,” I said.

He lifted his face.

“Whatever you want.”

“Don’t ask me for forgiveness today so you can sleep peacefully.”

It broke him more than any scream.

The next day he went to his mother’s house.

Without dignity, but with two suitcases and a video game loaded as if it were something important. Before leaving, he stopped at the door.

“So it’s over?”

I looked at him.

“I don’t know if the marriage is over. But the version where you do it and I swallow it is over.

I closed the door.

I leaned against him, listening to his footsteps coming down.

Then I cried.

Of course I cried.

It was not stone.

I cried for the woman who compared herself to Fernanda without owing anything. For the one who stopped wearing dresses because he never noticed. So I thought that being a wife was swallowing small humiliations so as not to look insecure.

Then I took a shower.

I put the red dress back on.

Not for a photo.

To buy bread.

I went to a bakery in the Ibirapuera region. I bought a shell, a chocolate and a coffee. I sat on a bench and watched the city go by with dogs, offices, ladies with bags, young people with headphones and couples still not knowing what they would not forgive one day.

The city went on.

Me too.

Days later, Fernanda sent me a message.

“Are you okay?”

I replied:

“I’m learning.”

She said:

“Me too.”

We didn’t become friends in the movie.

We don’t go out to celebrate anyone’s fall.

We only stopped being enemies in a story written by someone who needed villains so as not to look in the mirror.

Ricardo tried to return.

First with long messages.

Then with photos of our dog, as if that would solve everything. Then audios saying that I was in therapy, that I understood, that it was stupid, that I didn’t want to lose myself.

I didn’t answer at the time.

Not because I wanted to punish him.

But because I didn’t run to every noise he made.

Weeks later, I went to Avenida Paulista. I went up and saw the city from up there, immense, gray, golden, impossible. I thought about how it started as something else and ended up as a monument. Something incomplete that became destiny.

I liked the idea.

Maybe me too.

That night I posted another photo.

No studio.

A simple selfie, hair blowing in the wind, city behind.

The sentence said:

“There are women who don’t separate for lack of love. They separate because they finally chose each other.”

I didn’t tag anyone.

I didn’t give hints.

Even so, Ricardo’s cell phone burned again.

This time not by Fernanda.

For me.

He sent a message:

“Does that mean there’s no turning back?”

I looked at it for a long time.

Then I opened the window. Outside there was traffic, tamale sellers, dogs barking and people laughing on the sidewalk. Common life. Life that we lose when we spend too much time trying not to be humiliated.

I replied:

“I don’t know. But if one day there is a return, it won’t be for the woman you diminished.”

I put the phone on silent.

I made coffee, broke the shell and sat on the couch.

The same sofa.

The difference is that now my faith was no longer in marriage.

It was in me.

And that, for the first time in a long time, didn’t feel half alive.

It seemed whole.