Kids are experts at detecting omissions.
After several long seconds, his shoulders relaxed slightly.
He leaned back against the cushion.
His gaze drifted toward the window.
“Every time I close my eyes,” he signed quietly,
“I see Mom.”
My breath caught.
“She feels closer than before.”
I felt the weight of every lost year settle heavily across my shoulders as I watched him.
I had once been here, helping Yannis recover from the trauma of losing his mother. After her death, he had withdrawn into silence — losing the ability to speak, trapped inside grief too heavy for a child to carry.
Slowly, carefully, I had been rebuilding that broken world for him. He was beginning to open up again. The words werereturning. The trust was returning. The stability I gave him was something he clung to.
Until Ruslan decided Yannis could do without me.
And just like that — quietly, deliberately — Ruslan began pulling his son away from me, dismantling the fragile foundation I had spent so long building.
He didn’t destroy it with anger. He destroyed it with distance.
Gently.
Systematically.
He took the stability I had given Yannis — and removed me from it.
Blind with revenge.
Obsessed with control.
Ruslan had done this to him.
Not intentionally perhaps to hurt his son —
But intentionally to remove me.
And in doing so, he had created a vacuum that swallowed the child’s voice.
I inhaled slowly and took both of Yannis’s hands in mine.
My thumbs brushed over his knuckles.
It grounded him.
It grounded me.
“I’m here now, Yannis,” I signed carefully. “And I promise you — you will speak again.”
His eyes followed my hands closely.
He understood every word.
