“It means I brought her home.”
“Papà.”
I look away first, and I dislike myself for it.
Matteo’s voice is softer when he speaks.
“We are not asking you to replace Mamma.”
My gaze snaps back to his.
His expression changes, not with fear, but with care.
“No one could,” he says.
The answer is immediate. “No.”
“We know.”
Tomasso nods once. “We know that better than anyone.”
I breathe in through my nose.
Slowly.
That is the thing I forget when guilt makes me stupid. They know exactly what Anna’s absence feels like because they have lived with it too. They are not outsiders peering into grief they cannot understand. They are not asking some careless thing of me because they have forgotten her.
They remember.
They remember everything.
“She was your mother,” I say.
“Yes,” Matteo says. “And she was your wife.”
The same thing he said before, almost.
But it feels different now somehow.
Tomasso leans forward, forearms on the edge of the table. “She loved you. She also knew you were impossible, possessive, arrogant, and irritatingly dramatic when you decided to suffer in silence.”
Matteo adds, “She said that last part often.”
I look at him.
He lifts one shoulder. “Not always in those words.”
Despite myself, something in my chest loosens.
Tomasso sees it and pushes.
“She would have hated you turning loyalty into loneliness.”
The words are precise. Like a bullet that’s found its mark.
My jaw works once.
“That’s enough.”
