any formal discussion, Ana became the one expected to do everything.

She had left her job temporarily after Mateo was born.

I saw her as a woman recovering from childbirth while caring for a baby.

My family saw her as available labor.

My mother corrected her constantly.

How she held the baby.

How she burped him.

How she sterilized bottles.

How long she breastfed.

What she cooked.

How much salt she used.

Whether the floors were clean enough.

My father wanted meals at exact hours and complained if the apartment was noisy when he wanted to nap.

Sergio ordered coffee from the sofa, dropped dirty clothes beside the bathroom, and asked where his clean shirts were as if he were speaking to hotel staff.

Ana rarely fought back.

That silence fooled me at first.

I thought it meant things were manageable.

What it really meant was that she was drowning quietly.

Later, once the truth came out, I replayed warning signs with unbearable clarity.

The morning I found her washing one of Sergio’s shirts by hand while Mateo cried in his crib.

The day my mother told her, with a tight smile, that “real women don’t complain after childbirth.”

The night Mateo had a fever and Ana stayed awake until almost dawn, only to be in the kitchen at five in the morning because my father “needed a proper breakfast.”

And the worst part was that whenever I tried to push back, my family treated my wife’s suffering like disrespect toward them.

My mother would say, “We came to help and this is the gratitude we get?”

My father would mutter, “Since that woman came into your life, you don’t think clearly.”

Sergio once laughed and said, “A wife can smell weakness.

She already knows she has you trained.”

That evening in the kitchen, seeing Ana tremble with exhaustion while three healthy adults sat idle, I finally drew a line.

Or at least I thought I had.

After the argument, my parents retreated to the living room in offended silence.

Sergio kept muttering curses under his breath.

Ana got Mateo to sleep and nearly collapsed beside him.

I sat alone in the dark and felt a restlessness I could not explain.

I opened my bank app.

At first I told myself I was only checking routine payments, but instinct was doing the driving.

I saw several transfers I did not recognize.

They were not huge enough to trigger immediate panic.

They were the kind of amounts someone chooses when they want theft to look like carelessness.

One hundred eighty euros.

Three hundred forty.

Two hundred ninety-five.

Another four hundred and ten.

All spread over weeks.

When I totaled them, my chest tightened.

I went to the drawer where I kept an old phone I no longer used.

It still held an email account I had once linked for backup codes.

When I switched it on, I found login alerts and confirmation messages that had disappeared from my main inbox months ago.

My mouth went dry.

Then I remembered the living room camera.

We had installed it when Mateo was born so Ana could glance at the baby’s crib on her phone if she was in another room.

I barely used it anymore, but the cloud subscription was still active.

I