I watched his hands move over the pages carefully, touching them like they were fragile, priceless things.
Maybe to him, they were.
Then he stopped.
His fingers went still on a folded sheet in the corner. His whole body went rigid. His eyes fixed too hard.
Too sharp.
“She drew me without a face,” he said, voice so low it was almost a whisper.
But there was something in it that cut through me.
Pain.
Shock.
Guilt.
I lifted my eyes slowly, my heart beating faster as I stared at the drawing in his hands.
Clara had drawn herself holding my hand. Me holding hers.
And beside us, a tall male shape with no eyes. No mouth. No features at all.
A faceless shadow.
Underneath, in crooked child handwriting—spelling wrong, letters uneven—it read:
INVISIBLE DADDY.
My chest tightened with a pain so sharp I couldn’t breathe for a second.
Enrico didn’t move.
He looked like stone. Shoulders tense. Jaw locked. His stare fixed on the emptiness where a face should have been—on the void he had helped create.
“Because you didn’t have one,” I said, voice low and steady and lethal.
He swallowed, unable to look at me.
“I swear I never wanted this,” he whispered, and the near-pleading edge in it made something inside me react in a way I hated. I wanted to scream. I wanted to—
No. Not that. Not ever.
“But you did it anyway,” I said.
A verdict.
Silence fell again—heavy, crushing.
I looked down and pretended to return to sorting, but something had shifted.
In me.
In him.
For the first time since Enrico returned to my life, he didn’t have an answer.
