Yesterday’s words came back like stones in my chest—the anger, the shouting, the way I had flung her past in her face. I’d demanded the truth of who my father was, and when she refused, I’d turned cruel. I said things I could never take back—about her choices, her work, the life she’d endured alone. I wanted honesty, but I gave her only shame.
I should have waited. I should have listened.
When I saw her again, I’d beg her forgiveness. I’d tell her I was wrong—that I’d wait as long as it took for her to speak his name. She deserved my patience, not my rage.
The thought steadied me, small and certain, as the cottage came into view through the haze. I almost smiled. I’d make it right.
Then the warning screamed through me.
Something inside twisted. The air shifted.
The door hung open. Splintered.
Cracked down the center, as if an axe had struck through it.
The peace was shattered.
I froze at the edge of the yard, heart hammering, breath caught somewhere between my ribs and throat. The sea still murmured behind me, steady and eternal, as if mocking the silence that had fallen ahead.
And then I whispered the only word that would come.
“Mother.”
My pulse detonated. The world collapsed into a tunnel of sound and breath as I ran, sandals slipping on the packed earth. The salt wind burned my throat, the air itself thick and heavy. My heart thundered so violently I thought it might split open before I reached the door.
I crossed the threshold—and the world ended.
My mother, lay collapsed on the clay floor, blood pooling dark beneath her, thick and gleaming as it soaked through the reed mats. The air stank of iron and salt. Her arm was stretched toward the door, fingers curled, as though she’d been reaching for me. Her head was turned slightly, eyes half-open, lips parted—caught in the moment before breath became silence.
Everything inside me went still.
Then it broke.
I dropped to my knees. I didn’t feel the pain. The sound that came from me wasn’t a word, not even human. It was raw and jagged, ripped out from somewhere deep where language didn’t live.
I crawled to her. The clay bit into my palms, her blood slick beneath my fingers. When I gathered her into my arms, she folded like water spilling from a cracked jar.
“Mother…” The word barely left my lips. “No. No, please.”
Her hair still smelled of jasmine oil, of smoke from the hearth, of home. I pressed my face into it, desperate to breathe her in, to hold what life remained. But her skin was already cold. Her silence was absolute.
And in that silence, guilt tore me open.
I hadn’t said I was sorry.
Not for the anger. Not for the words I’d hurled yesterday. Not for the way I let pride replace patience. I thought I’d have time to make it right. I thought the gods would grant me one more day.
But they hadn’t.
The house swayed around me, the walls closing in. I could hear the sea beyond the door, steady and cruel, whispering as if mocking the sound of my breath.
Amara and Salvatore burst in behind me.
Amara stopped first. “Oh gods…” she breathed. Her voice cracked. “No—not her.”
Amara fell beside me, her linen tunic brushing the blood-soaked mat. Her hands trembled as she brushed the hair from my mother’s brow—fingers gentle, reverent. Then, with a whisper that split the stillness, she closed my mother’s eyes.
“May the gods take her swiftly,” she murmured. “May her spirit rest among the stars.”
