Jasna knew how a woman waiting for somebody else's husband behaved. She did not call him in the evening, leave earrings at his apartment, or ever ask whether they could go away together over the holidays. During their first month, Alen had told her that his marriage had long existed only on paper, but his wife struggled with change. Jasna had expanded that cautious description into an entire life for the unknown woman, her sensitivity, loneliness, and tendency to cause scenes.
At a mutual acquaintance's birthday party, Alen introduced her to a childhood friend. While he went to find a bottle opener, the friend laughed and asked whether she had finally persuaded the eternal bachelor to buy curtains. Jasna thought the man knew nothing about the secret collapse of the marriage. She asked when Alen had married. The friend raised his eyebrows. "He hasn't. Even his mother has stopped mentioning weddings."
She waited for Alen to return, then said they needed to go outside. At the entrance he first tried claiming that his friend knew nothing about his private life. When Jasna headed back to fetch him, Alen caught her sleeve and released it before she said anything. He admitted it. He wanted a relationship in which nobody expected a shared apartment, introductions to parents, or an entire Saturday together. A married man, he said, at least came with restrictions that were understood in advance.
"You could have told me you didn't want those things," she replied. "Then you would have thought you could change me." Jasna looked up at the window of the apartment where she had so often pulled on her boots quietly. There was no wife who might arrive. There was no reason to whisper either. For months she had participated in a humiliation he invented for his own convenience, and she accepted because its forbidden nature lent significance to his brief visits.
Later she told a friend only that Alen had lied. Her friend said it was good that at least nobody else had been hurt. Jasna wanted to keep that simple version. Nevertheless, she admitted she had believed all along that another woman existed. She spoke more slowly than usual. She did not ask her friend to excuse her by invoking an unhappy marriage that had never existed. For the first time she tried imagining the unknown wife without qualities that would make her own choice easier.
A few days later, Alen wrote that they were now free to be a normal couple. The message angered her more than his initial admission. His imaginary wife had been dismissed as soon as she stopped serving a purpose. Jasna did not reply. On Saturday she went to collect the earrings she had, after all, once forgotten. She rang the bell loudly and stayed in the hallway until he brought them out.