The tango shoes in the bottom drawer

Dear Delyara, I am thirty-nine, a respected judge in the municipal court, known for my cold sentences and my conservative black suits. My clerks think I spend my weekends reading penal codes. They do not know about the basement clubs in San Telmo where the air smells of cheap gin and sweat. They do not know that when the lights go down, I put on the high silk heels and let myself be held by men whose names I never ask, dancing until my shins bleed and my heart hammers like a trapped bird. I live a double life because the truth would ruin my career in an instant, but the secrecy is a slow poison. I am a warden who has built a prison so perfect that I am locked inside my own respectable lie.