Excerpt from The Accidentals by Guadalupe Nettel, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The saleswoman smiled at me, pleased. With her long, delicate fingers, she took a sweet from the folder and placed it into a little see-through bag.

'This time it's five hundred, Mr Moncada.'

I thought the amount excessive—it would have covered the service I'd been expecting from her, or, failing that, at least five packets of sweets from the supermarket—but my relationship with these people had barely begun, and I didn't want to make a bad impression, so I tried to hide my surprise.

'What exactly does the price include?' I asked, as naturally as I could.

'The sweet and all its consequences,' she said, abruptly adopting a very serious air. 'Do you have any more family, Mr Moncada? Do you share your life with someone aside from your wife, is there another person who is very important to you?'

Only then did I become aware of all the information I had given this young woman about my private life, but it was one thing to be indiscreet and a different matter entirely for her to be asking me questions. I considered the possibility they might extort me.

'No. It's just me and her,' I replied, curtly.

As I sucked on the sweet, I thanked the saleswoman and hurried out of the place, minded never to return.

When I got home, my wife's car was not in the garage. The door to the kitchen, which we always left open, was locked. All the blinds were down and, even though it wasn't yet dark, the light on the porch was on. In the dining room, I found a note in Lili's handwriting: I'll be in court till six. Back for dinner^p^p. It had been years since my wife worked on a case, and even longer since she'd gone to court in person. My heart racing, I headed to the kitchen, took some fish and vegetables out of the fridge, and began preparing them, as I had done for years, back when my wife worked outside the home, and which probably constituted the happiest period of my life. Two hours later, Lili returned. The tight-fitting skirt she was wearing looked perfect on her. The weight she had lost wasn't the only thing that struck me: she was wearing her hair long too, and stylishly cut, with not a single grey hair on her head. She thanked me for dinner, poured herself the first of several glasses of wine, and began talking animatedly about the trial and everyone involved in it that morning, taking it for granted that I was still interested in all these details and, sure enough—to my utter surprise—they did indeed interest me once again. Soon after, Lili came to sit on my lap and began to unbutton my shirt. I felt a desire for her even greater than the one she used to awaken in me when we first knew each other. As my lips slid along her neck, I told myself that five hundred pesos was really a laughably low price.

I remained like that for a week, enjoying the new situation intensely. Lili went to court in the mornings, and I would stay home on my own, working on my insurance forecasts in the study and then recouping territory in the rest of the house. In the evenings I would take great pains to prepare delicious dinners that always had a happy ending, whether in the living room or our bedroom. Who needed to think about hiring some strange woman when Lili was embodying the best possible version of herself? Though I had by now identified the source of all these changes, thinking about it was beyond me. So as not to worry about it, I decided to assume that life had always been like this, and that it would continue to be so indefinitely; that instead of going back to the little sweet shop that afternoon, I had woken from a long siesta and the years of unhappiness in my marriage had been nothing but a bad dream. My life with Lili was so harmonious at that point that I wonder if it wouldn't have been better to leave it that way forever.

By around the third week, I began to feel the lack of something that, at first, I struggled to identify.

'Have you heard from Clara? I asked my wife one evening, just before dinner.

Excerpted from The Accidentals by Guadalupe Nettel. Copyright © 2025 by Guadalupe Nettel. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.