Catalina's Relationship with a Female Partner

Catalina’s relationship with an unnamed female partner is disclosed to Lucas Pereyra at a moment when their marriage is already strained, but its revelation overturns the explanation he had prepared for her secrecy. Catalina tells him that she is in love with a woman, has loved her for almost a year, and will no longer hide the relationship. Lucas’s shock and hurt shape the account, while Catalina’s decision to speak openly begins a rethinking of what family can mean for Maiko.

The relationship and its disclosure

After a night at the hospital, Catalina and Lucas return home: she is unusually quiet, and he is carrying radiographs of his fractured rib. Catalina tells him that Maiko will sleep at her mother’s house, then says that the marriage cannot continue as it has and that they need to discuss what they both want. She asks Lucas who Magalí Guerra is and requests the truth. He tells her about Guerra, but reads Catalina’s disappointment as a sign that she had expected a more consequential admission. In his view, his distant attachment to Guerra was not the revelation she needed in order to explain her own.

Catalina then tells Lucas that she is in love with a woman who is her friend. When he responds by assuming she cannot be lesbian, Catalina does not adopt a settled label: she says that she does not know whether she is lesbian, only that she likes this woman. She identifies her partner as a doctor who works at Trinidad and says they met at a Fundación Cardio Life cocktail on a terrace. Their relationship has involved emails and WhatsApp messages, meetings, and smoking marijuana at the partner’s home. Catalina says that they have loved one another for nearly a year and that she will no longer keep the relationship hidden. The account gives no name for the partner and does not supply her perspective; Catalina’s desire is conveyed through what she tells Lucas.

Lucas’s shock and the unequal knowledge between them

Lucas admits that he did not anticipate Catalina’s disclosure. He had been convinced she was seeing a male doctor from the foundation and had invested his suspicions in that possibility. The fact that her lover is a woman unsettles not only his assumptions about the affair but also his understanding of his own place in the marriage. He wonders whether Catalina no longer liked men or whether the change concerned only him, revealing how quickly he measures her desire against his own identity and their sexual history.

His response is described as bodily as well as emotional. Walking along Avenida Santa Fe among closed clothing shops, he feels close to fainting; he experiences cold and heat at once, and his head pounds. The physical details register a revelation he says he is still processing. He also acknowledges that he remains hurt, particularly in a sexual sense, and describes himself as a wounded man. Yet he distinguishes that injury from hatred or anger: the disclosure has wounded his pride and unsettled his self-image, but he does not claim to hate Catalina.

The confession also exposes a wider imbalance in what each spouse knew and admitted. Elsewhere in his account, Lucas describes having conducted his own affairs with considerable secrecy, taking care to avoid public encounters and erase messages. He believes Catalina had sensed something despite those precautions, and interprets her later lateness and concealed plans as a possible, partly conscious retaliation. That is Lucas’s reading, not a confirmed account of Catalina’s motives. It nevertheless places his surprise at her relationship beside his own concealed conduct: he had managed uncertainty by imagining a male rival, while Catalina’s disclosure made clear that the desire and attachment he had not understood could not be reduced to that assumption.

The disclosure’s social consequences

The revelation does not remain private between the spouses. Lucas says Catalina’s mother called him and asked about her, leaving him unsure what to say. Catalina’s father did not speak to her for two months. The news also became a shock among her cousins and their friends. Lucas recalls that people initially took his side, then began to understand Catalina. His account thus records a shift in the surrounding group’s response, from immediate alignment with the injured husband toward a more complicated recognition of Catalina’s position.

These reactions emphasize the difference between telling Lucas and being able to live openly. Catalina says she will no longer conceal the relationship, but the family’s response shows that disclosure carries consequences beyond the couple: silence from her father, questions from her mother, and changing loyalties among relatives and friends. The narrative does not present those reactions as resolving the marriage’s conflict. Instead, they form the social aftermath of Catalina’s insistence that her love be acknowledged rather than kept out of view.

A changed idea of family

In reflecting on the disclosure, Lucas connects the couple’s crisis to the family model in which they grew up. He says that this inherited idea filled them with anguish once its cracks became visible, and argues that they need to think differently. The practical proposals he makes are specific: Maiko can live with Catalina and her partner on the weekdays when he is not with Lucas; Lucas wants to meet the partner and would welcome Catalina and Maiko at his home for a meal. He imagines Maiko seeing the three adults together without nervousness or silence, and allows for the possibility that a future partner of his own might also join them.

Lucas extends that possibility from an ordinary visit to shared activities and perhaps vacations. He recognizes that staying in the same house might be too much, but suggests that the adults could go to the same seaside resort. The proposals do not erase the hurt recorded in his account, nor do they establish that every arrangement will occur. They show, instead, a change in the terms he is willing to imagine: Maiko’s family need not be confined to the married couple’s former household, and Catalina’s partner need not remain a secret or an unseen presence.

The relationship therefore marks both a rupture in Lucas’s expectations and an opening in his conception of kinship. He describes Catalina’s decision as an act of courage and uses the image of throwing family photographs to the floor to express the need to disturb an idealized arrangement. His movement from shock toward a proposed, more openly shared life remains tentative, but the terms of that proposal matter: he wants Maiko to encounter the adults in her life together without the silence that concealment produced. Catalina’s disclosure changes not only what Lucas knows about her love, but also the family structure he believes they can build around their son.