That should have prepared me.
It does not.
“You’re thinking about Mamma.”
Everything in me goes still.
Tomasso’s smile disappears.
The mood in the room shifts.
My sons are watching me, and my dead wife has taken her seat in the empty space across from me.
I set my knife down carefully.
“No,” I say.
Matteo’s eyes stay on mine.
A lie, then.
We all know it.
There are many things my sons will allow me. Authority. Distance. Silence when it serves something.
Not this.
Not anymore, apparently.
Tomasso looks down at his plate, then back at me. “Papà.”
The word is quiet. In a way Tomasso so rarely is.
It only makes it land harder.
I lean back in my chair.
There are topics we do not touch in this house. Not because I forbade them. I never had to. Grief makes its own rules when it enters a home. Everyone learns where to step. Everyone learns which doors stay closed.
Anna has been behind one of those doors for ten years.
No.
Not Anna.
Anna is everywhere.
Her death is behind the door.
The night she died.
The paramedics in my home.
My wife on the floor.
All the blood.
My vision narrows for half a second, and I am back there before I can stop it.
