My throat closes.
Matteo leans forward slightly.
“You think you abandoned her,” he says.
I do not answer.
Because yes.
That is exactly what I think.
Every day for ten years.
“You didn’t,” he says.
I look at him.
For a moment, I do not see the grown man sitting across from me.
I see the boy at seventeen, pale and silent in a black suit, accepting condolences with the same steady face because he thought that was what I needed from him.
I had needed him to be a child.
I had not known how to ask.
Tomasso speaks next, voice rough.
“You lost her too, Papà.”
Too.
Such a small word.
It guts me.
For ten years, I have thought of Anna as my guilt and their grief.
I did not understand they had been watching me carry the guilt and calling it grief because they had no other name for it.
“I was responsible for her,” I say.
Tomasso shakes his head. “She would hate hearing you say that.”
A ghost of a smile crosses my face. “She would.”
“She’d throw something,” Matteo says. “At your head.”
“Probably not the good china, though,” Tomasso adds.
A silence follows.
This one is different.
Not easy.
Never easy.
But not closed.
