Isabella Iero left Manchester on a gray morning that looked like all the others, but years later she would remember it as an invisible fracture in her life. The train departed with a metallic sigh, carrying her to London, to college, to a city far too big for someone who had learned how to exist on smaller streets—where everyone knew her father’s name and remembered, with almost reverent care, the mother she had lost far too early. Frank Iero stayed on the platform until the train disappeared. Isabella remembered that moment the way one remembers a recurring dream: her father shrinking inside his old coat, waving with his right hand, his left buried deep in his pocket, as if holding everything he didn’t have the courage to say. He was all she had. No siblings. A mother gone when Isabella was still too young to understand the difference between memory and imagination. Aunts and cousins who existed more as names on Christmas cards than as real people. London swallowed her whole with its urgency, its buildings that seemed to watch those who passed by. Isabella grew there. She learned how to pay bills, how to share tiny apartments, how to cry silently in public bathrooms. Above all, she learned how to ask questions—and how to listen. That was probably why journalism felt so natural. As a child, she used to sit on the living room floor, holding a hairbrush like a microphone, asking questions far too serious for someone so small. Frank would laugh and answer as if he were at an important press conference. Sometimes his friend Noel was there too. Noel Gallagher. To Isabella, he had always been just that: a tall man with observant eyes and a crooked smile, who showed up carrying bags of records and stories that felt too big for their narrow kitchen. He played with her, let her “interview” him, answered with exaggerated seriousness that made her laugh until her stomach hurt. Then, slowly, Noel appeared less often. Life happened. London happened to Isabella. Manchester became a fixed point in the rearview mirror. The news of Frank’s death arrived on an ordinary Tuesday—one of those days that promises nothing. The phone call was short. Too formal. Words like heart attack and sudden fell like objects hitting the floor, loud but meaningless at first. Isabella hung up and stood in the middle of her room, staring at the wall, waiting for something inside her to organize itself. Nothing did. The funeral took place two days later, in Manchester. The church smelled overwhelmingly of flowers, an almost aggressive perfume. Isabella felt out of place, as if she had walked into a scene that no longer belonged to her. Faces she barely recognized, people who had aged while she had been away. Hugs. Whispered words. Ready-made sentences that slid off her without leaving a mark. Then she saw him. Noel stood near the back, grayer than she remembered, but with the same slightly hunched posture—like someone carrying more thoughts than he should. For a moment, Isabella thought he was a trick of her mind, grief playing cruel games. But then he looked up. And he recognized her. The impact was physical. The tears she had been holding back with almost brutal discipline finally broke free. They fell hot and uncontrollable. Noel walked toward her without haste, as if any sudden movement might shatter something fragile in the air. When they hugged, there were no words. Only shared grief. The heavy silence that said more than any speech ever could. Isabella caught his familiar scent—something between coffee and old paper—and for a brief moment, she was a child again. Later, when most people had left, Isabella sat alone on a bench in the cemetery, a little distance away, staring at the ground covered in dry leaves. The sky hung low, threatening rain. She thought about London, about how everything there suddenly felt wrong, as if she had moved too far from the only fixed point she had ever known. "Bella." Noel said softly. "Frank left a few things with me. And I think this should be yours." He pulled out an old camera, heavy, worn with time.