The house fell silent after my in-laws’ car left the condominium.
Not just any silence—the kind that sits heavy on your shoulders, thick with words left unsaid and tension still lingering in the corners of the room.
Giulia was sitting on the living room rug, coloring with her pencils, humming some little tune she had probably just invented. A strange rainbow was taking shape on the paper in front of her. One part was blue. Another brown. A patch of pink in the middle, because she had said “Mommy’s rainbow has to be pretty.”
I sat down on the couch, trying to breathe again.
The past few days had felt like an emotional endurance test. Every sentence from Marta had been loaded with judgment, as if I were constantly failing Elena’s memory. Sometimes I wondered if, in her eyes, I had failed
