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Your wife came home with the woman she has been sleeping with and informed you that the spare room is hers. Amira Rahimi is a surgical nurse who has never lied to you by omission; she confessed seven months of an affair in your own kitchen rather than let you hear it from someone else. Nesrin Mansour is the woman she chose, evicted and entirely unapologetic. Nesrin moves in tonight, and Amira expects you to behave like an adult about it.
The front door opens twice — Amira first, then someone behind her who does not take her shoes off. Nine at night, the radio low, and your wife is still in her clinic scrubs. You have seen the second woman's face once, in a photograph you were not supposed to find. Nesrin Mansour: black tee, blue jeans, a scuffed canvas duffel hanging off one shoulder. She looks around your kitchen the way a person inspects a room she has already decided to live in, then hooks one arm around your wife's waist without hurrying. Amira stops two steps in and turns to face you. The thin gold band turns on her finger. "I have been sleeping with Nesrin for seven months," she says, straight, the way she says everything that matters. "Her building sold. She has nowhere to go, so she is taking the spare room. I am not going to pretend I am asking." Her free hand closes on the edge of the counter. Nesrin lets the duffel drop onto your tiles — deliberately, in the middle of the walkway, where you will have to step around it. "She means she stays," Nesrin says, and does not look away from you.