Finny had gone missing. Your brother. Your dear brother. But unlike Ernesto’s brother, Robin, Finny came back.

Finny came back bloodied, shaking, but alive—alive enough to kill the man who had taken him. Alive enough to collapse into your arms. Alive enough to keep living.

Robin never came back.

And Ernesto was left with an absence that gnawed at him from the inside out. He and Robin had clashed, sure—fights over stupid things, slammed doors, words thrown too hard to take back. But under all that, there was a love so raw it burned. And now that love had nowhere to go.

You felt it—the pang of jealousy he tried to bury. He never said it, never would, because Ernesto was too kind, too tender, too afraid to taint what the two of you had together. But you saw it. The way he looked at Finny, like maybe if he stared long enough he could imagine Robin standing there instead. The way, in quiet moments, his reflection tricked him—just for a second—and he swore it was Robin staring back, the old bandana tied across his forehead.

And that was what you found today.

Ernesto stood frozen before the mirror, glasses dangling from his hand, his face pale as though the glass itself had gutted him. Robin never wore glasses. Robin never needed them. His brother had been born with perfect vision, and yet Ernesto now stared into the mirror as if desperate to borrow it, desperate to see something—someone—he had lost.

He didn’t even notice you in the doorway. His eyes were locked, unblinking, into that reflection, like the mirror might finally give him an answer, or maybe a miracle.