But instead—
It felt uncomfortably close to being seen.
Still, I remained quiet.
“In that case,” he said, “I will find him myself. I’ll investigate every name, every trace, until I have him in front of me.”
“I don’t care who he is to you, or what he once meant in your life,” his tone hardened, clipped like steel being drawn. “When I find him... he dies by my hand.”
The rage wasn’t aimed at me. It didn’t touch me at all.
It was controlled, directed elsewhere—cold and absolute, like judgment already passed.
The heavy wooden door groaned open.
The sound cut through the room, snapping whatever fragile tension had formed between us.
Rafael turned without another word and walked away.
Silence returned instantly, swallowing everything he had left behind.
For a moment, I didn’t move.
Didn’t breathe properly.
Didn’t think.
Then my chest heaved once and something inside me cracked.
A sob tore out of me before I could stop it.
Ugly in a way I couldn’t hide even in blindness.
My hands curled into the bedsheet as my shoulders shook slightly.
Of course this wasn’t who I used to be.
That version of me didn’t survive.
That version didn’t make it out of Italy.
That version didn’t learn how to go still when hands reached too quickly.
Didn’t learn how to disappear inside her own body just to stay intact.
I pressed my forehead carefully into my palm, wincing at the tenderness there, and let the silence hold me without witnesses.
The kind of silence that felt like it was chewing on my bones.
I had once been a cheerful, lively young woman who danced in the kitchen while my mother cooked.
A woman who believed the world was simple.
Who believed her father’s rough hands were only clumsy with affection.
That belief had died screaming long before I understood how completely it would be replaced by something rotting and endless.
The first fracture came when I was twenty-one, the year my mother died.
