“Now tell me why you’re sorry.”
There it is. The hard part.
My stomach clenches. I grab another breadstick. Swirl it through marinara, creating patterns, destroying them.
“Ghosts are hard for me.”
The breadstick keeps moving. Circle after circle. Red sauce bleeding onto the white plate.
“I don’t mean to dismiss you. Your gifts. The things you know.” The breadstick trembles in my grip. “But acknowledging that ghosts are real, that the dead live on, that there’s this whole... veil or whatever?—”
Alex’s hand reaches across the table.
“Wait.” I pull back, hands in my lap now. Fists. “I got to get this out.”
“I’m listening.”
“If ghosts are real.” My throat’s closing again. That familiar squeeze. “If there’s this whole world where dead people canreach out and communicate and show up in the middle of the night?—”
Wine. I need wine. The glass shakes against my teeth.
“Where’s my dad?”
The question cracks on the way out. Fifteen years I’ve been waiting for him to prove the dead can stay. Fifteen years of silence.
“Why didn’t he visit? Why didn’t he come to me? I was twelve, Alex. I was a kid. And he just... left. No goodbye. No message. Nothing.”
Tears now. In Villa di Roma on Galentine’s Birthday dinner while some family three tables over is celebrating their Nonna’s birthday.
“If dead people can reach out, if they can knock on walls and move things and show up for the people they love—why didn’t he love me enough to try?”
“Oh Dylan.” This time her hand finds mine. Warm. Solid. Real. “It doesn’t always work like that.”
“But why? Why doesn’t it work like that? Don’t I deserve a goodbye?”
“You do. We all deserve that goodbye.” Her thumb makes circles on my palm. “But here’s the thing. None of us truly know all the answers. What I do know is your dad loved you very much and he’d want you to have that closure.”
She pauses. That careful pause when she’s measuring words like ingredients.
“You also have to be open to it. To the world. Not as you see it but as it could be.”
My head moves. Slow nod. My free hand swipes at my face. “I’m trying.”
“I know.” She studies me, thumb still making those circles. “You know what I think?”
“What?”
“Losing him that young, that suddenly—it made you shut down the part of you that knows things without proof. Because if you couldn’t sense him leaving, if your intuition didn’t warn you the worst day of your life was coming...” She squeezes. “Why trust it at all?”
She’s right. Twelve-year-old me learned that feelings lie. That the only safe thing is what you can prove. That intuition is just another word for wrong.
The words hit somewhere between my shoulder blades. That place where truth lands when you don’t want it. “Fuck.”
“And that’s why we need to fix your intuition. Tonight. Before we go any deeper with Dahlia.”
“My intuition?” The word feels foreign in my mouth. “What does that have to do with?—”
“Everything.” She releases my hand for her wine glass. “You’ve been walking through the world half-blind, Dylan. Ignoring every signal your body sends you. Every warning. Every innate knowing.”
