When the road turns, and the old monastery is finally gone from view, I take Vincenzo’s ring from my pocket and close my hand around it.
“I’m coming home, My King,” I whisper.
The word home should feel strange, but it doesn’t anymore.
Not when the only place left in the world where I still know how to be his is waiting in the middle of the sea.
thirty-nine
Nikolaj
AweekonIsleLuciateaches me the difference between silence and absence.
Silence is something I used to like. Silence meant control. It meant no one was speaking unless I allowed it, no one was moving unless I heard them, and no one was trying to fill the air with useless noise because they were too afraid of their own thoughts to sit still inside them.
Silence used to feel clean to me. Cold, maybe, but honest. A room either had a threat in it, or it didn’t. A hallway either held footsteps, or it didn’t. A bed was either empty, or it wasn’t.
These were simple things, and I was always good with simple things, especially when the world tried to dress them up as emotion.
Absence is not simple.
It sits in the villa with me and waits. It moves from room to room without making a sound. It gets into the sheets, the bath, the terrace, the fucking kitchen, where Vincenzo stood with acoffee cup and looked at me as if learning calm with me might become a habit if the world let us be stupid enough to try.
Absence is the shape left behind when someone belonged everywhere for one weekend, then stopped being alive before the house learned to exist without him.
It sits in the chair opposite mine at breakfast. It stretches out across the bed and makes the mattress too large. It stands at the window at sunset and looks out at the sea through his eyes because grief has a talent for using architecture against a man.
I never understood depression when I was younger. Not really. I understood rage and boredom. I understood grief in the way people around me expressed it: through silence, revenge, drinking, or decisions that made entire families suffer because one man could not admit he was hurt.
I understood the kind of despair that has motion in it. It could become strategy if you were disciplined enough, or bloodshed if you weren’t.
This is different.
This is a pit.
Waking every morning a little deeper than the day before and realizing at some point that the light above you is still there, but you no longer believe it has anything to do with you.
I eat because someone leaves food, and Kai, from a continent away, has apparently decided starvation is not an acceptable mourning practice.
I shower because smelling like death would offend Vincenzo’s ghost, and I can’t bring myself to disappoint even the imaginary version of him that keeps haunting the villa.
I sleep when exhaustion knocks me out hard enough that dreaming becomes another form of injury. I wake with the ring in my fist and the taste of his name in my mouth, and for a few seconds every morning, I forget.
That’s the worst part.
For a few seconds, I forget. Then I remember, and the day starts with a burial all over again.
Ruslan and Salvatore lasted four days before leaving.
Not because they abandoned me. I know the difference now, though I’m not sure I would’ve a year ago. They stayed because they thought someone should be here. They stayed in the cottage with its green shutters and stiff old porch chairs, moving around each other with the tentative, painful intimacy of men who got thirty years back too late but decided too late was still better than never.
Salvatore came up to the villa twice with food I didn’t eat and a face that looked like he wanted to say a hundred things and knew none of them would survive my silence.
Ruslan sat with me on the terrace one night without speaking for nearly an hour. Two glasses of vodka between us, his bad eye turned toward the sea, like he understood too well what it meant to sit somewhere beautiful and want to become part of the stone.
On the fourth morning, Salvatore told me they were going back to Kolomna.
He said it gently; that was how I knew Ruslan had not written the speech.
