THE WEEKEND THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING 15 - AT DAWN

The phone rang at nine fifteen at night. Juan was lying on the couch, watching a series, eating dinner. When he saw the name on the screen, he felt that familiar jolt in his chest, that mix of electricity and anxiety he had been feeling for several months now.

"Hello," he answered, lowering the volume of the TV with the remote control.

"Hello, bitch. How are you?"

Pedro's voice came with that unmistakable background noise: the car engine, the murmur of the road. He was driving.

"I'm fine, just eating dinner. And you? Where are you?"

"I'm coming back from a work trip, the one to Córdoba. I'm on my way to your place now."

Juan sat up in the couch. Automatically. As if the news that Pedro was coming made his body demand a different posture.

"What time will you arrive?"

"I don't know, to be honest. It depends on the road, traffic, if I stop to refuel. I reckon it'll be around dawn. Two, three, maybe. Don't wait up for me."

"Are you sure? I can wait up for you."

"No, sleep. I'll let myself in with my key. When I arrive, I'll wake you up."

"Okay."

"Have you been good these days?"

Juan smiled despite everything. That question, asked with such naturalness, like someone asking a coworker if they finished a report.

"I've been good."

"You'd better be. Okay, I'm on the road. See you in a bit."

Pedro hung up. Juan looked around the apartment: the dirty dishes, the clothes from the day thrown over a chair, the slippers in the middle of the hallway. He got up and started cleaning. Not because Pedro would notice at two in the morning, but because it was only right that he found everything in order.

He washed the dishes. Swept the kitchen. Cleaned the countertop. Went to the bedroom, made the sheets that had been bunched up since morning, arranged the pillows, put on the blanket. He showered, shaved what needed to be shaved. Routines that no longer required thought: his body executed them on its own, like a protocol.

He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. The smooth skin on his legs, chest, and armpits. The body of a 34-year-old man who did his best to stay in shape, not out of vanity but because Pedro required it.

He put on a black boxer - the most automatic act in the world, the gesture of someone who is going to sleep alone and, out of habit, out of inertia, puts something on - and went to bed. On his side, as he always slept, with his back to the bedroom door.

He fell asleep without realizing it, at some point between midnight and one.

At two thirty in the morning, Pedro entered the apartment with the stealth of someone who knows every inch of the place. He left his travel bag on the floor of the entrance without making a sound. He took off his slippers.

Pedro walked down the hallway to the bedroom door, which was ajar. He pushed it slowly.

The room...