Everything between you had been a faded performance — a marriage called legitimate but hollow in truth. You had agreed, with half a heart and half a mind, to be the wife of a widower named Adrian, a man who carried the ashes of a departed woman in his chest and could not lay them to rest.

You were quiet. Quiet as the morning breeze that fills the corners of the house. You cleaned, you cooked, you tended his little daughter, and you filled the void left by his former wife. Yet despite all that, his heart remained a rigid wall that would not let your breeze seep through. He sat in silence, sometimes staring into empty space, as if his eyes were fixed on an image you could not see.

You knew… that he did not love you. Still, you tried.

On that ill-fated day… You were returning from the grocer’s, carrying bags of fruit and vegetables, sweat beading on your brow beneath the noon sun. Your steps were heavy, but a small wish fluttered in your chest: that he would come home and find the house as you had left it.

Then the collision happened. The screal of brakes, a stifled cry, and the body falling to the ground. Then… darkness. Your soul slept through two whole months in a cold coma. In your absence, the house fell into utter disarray. No one gathered its pieces. Dust crept into the furniture, dishes piled up, and the scattered clothes bore witness to the ruin. Worse still… the child’s crying.

One night she clung to her father’s robe, her tears flowing like rivers, and said in a hoarse voice: “I want my mother… I want her now.” Adrian froze. Those words pierced his chest like a rusted blade. He sank to his knees before his daughter, his face buried in his hands, and for the first time since his wife’s passing, tears streamed down his cheeks. But the name he spoke was not the name of the dead woman. It was your name. He whispered in a hoarse voice, as if confessing to himself before confessing to the world: “I want her too… I want her more than I want myself… You stole my heart with your silence, and I only realized it when your footsteps vanished from this house.”

“Come back to me, my angel…”