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

I worked all next morning, trying not to think about anything that wasn't calculations and probabilities, but as soon as the heat grew less intense and the sky began to grow dark, I returned to Calle Mariposa, drawn by the mystery. The candelabra was already lit when I arrived and saw the half-open door. I had the feeling that someone was waiting for me. This time my feet stopped not at the entrance but a few feet away. Another man was waiting by the door. He wasn't wearing a uniform. More than a cinema employee, he looked like any one of my neighbours. Before knocking at the door, he straightened his shirt collar and smoothed down his trousers. He was let in almost immediately. The street was deserted, so I plucked up the courage to go over, even putting my ear against the door. I managed to hear the vibrations of a dialogue I interpreted as intimate but perhaps was merely discreet. I didn't want to be seen spying out in front of this house, this room, or whatever this place was, and so I started walking up and down the empty street. What did I hope to find, exactly? This is what I asked myself as I wandered anxiously around the block. My wife's hypothesis had awoken in me a peculiar fascination, as well as the awareness of having longed, for many years, not just to disobey her but to do something truly transgressive. To go whoring, a few feet from my house, was without a doubt transgressive. But was this really what this business was? I wasn't too convinced. If it was, I wasn't too sure I would dare take it all the way, either. The mere possibility stirred up in me a mixture of fear and elation which I hadn't experienced in a very long time, and this alone was already a bonus.

The man took a little over half an hour before emerging again, just when I had decided to leave. I carefully observed the happy expression on his face and felt a kind of envy—and simultaneously admiration—towards this individual, much bolder than I, who had been the first to pluck up the courage to resolve this enigma in our neighbourhood. It would probably have been enough just to intercept him and ask what he had discovered, but I wanted to see and hear it for myself. Once the street was empty again, I pushed at the door timidly but without hesitating a single second.

'Come on in,' said a voice from inside. 'Feel free to take a seat. We were waiting for you.' I recognized the girl who had given me the tiny sweet.

Ever since I was a boy, my way of combating embarrassment has consisted of talking nonstop, and that evening I made full use of this tactic. I explained to the seller that I had waited a long time before deciding to come, that I wasn't in the habit of leaving the house, and that it had doubtless helped that they had opened this place so close to where I lived, where I worked from home as an independent contractor. I also said—and I regret this—that things with my wife had not been going well for a few years now, ever since she had retired, to be precise, and just stayed at home endlessly telling me what to do and what not to do. To conclude my long spiel, I assured the seller that I was in need of some kind of supplementary emotion, opening my eyes very wide to stress that this was innuendo. When I recall that day, it is all I can do not to blush and feel flooded by a profound nostalgia, because since then, my life has never been the same.

'Don't worry, sir' replied the young woman. 'We're here to help you with whatever you need. That's what we do.'

I thought that I would be led then and there to the back of the establishment or, in the worst-case scenario, that the girl would get up to close the door and start undressing without further ado. But she merely took out a folder of samples, samples of sweets.

'Pick one,' she suggested, flicking through the clear plastic pages of the collection.

With the same verbal diarrhoea I'd displayed before, I told her that the aniseed-flavoured sweet from the previous afternoon had been delicious and that I would happily eat another, except this time I would like it to be a little larger.

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.