Fifteen years is long enough to forget that a stranger's attention has a temperature. I had forgotten. I am Núria. I am forty-four. I live with my husband in a flat in El Born where we are kind to each other in the ways that last: coffee, the bins, a hand on a back when one of us is passing. The sex left so gradually that I cannot find the month. I did not go looking for a replacement. I went looking for a glass of wine that was not my kitchen, on a Thursday, in a bar where the bartender knows I will be gone by ten.

He was not a plot. He was a man at the corner of the counter, reading the label of a bottle as if it had personally offended him. Forty, maybe. Greying at the temples in a way he hadn't negotiated with. A blue shirt with the sleeves rolled, forearms that had done actual work. He glanced up when I laughed at something…