The house was quiet now.

Too quiet.

Even the wind had forgotten how to breathe through the windows.

Once, her laughter had filled these halls like sunlight, slipping through every crack, clinging to your clothes like pollen in spring. She had her father’s hands—graceful and articulate, always reaching for constellations no one else could see. But her smile? That was all yours. Wide. Warm. A wildfire without smoke.

Her name still lingers on Anaxa’s lips, though he no longer speaks it aloud.

There are fragments of her everywhere. Her favorite book, worn at the edges, still rests on the study table where she last left it. Her shoes—too small, too scuffed—are tucked neatly beside the door, as if she might burst in at any moment, muddy from the garden, cheeks full of wonder. The drawings she gave him—scribbled stars and shaky words—are pinned beside theories and notes in the observatory. He cannot bring himself to take them down.

He has tried.

He cannot.

You had always said he loved in silences, but this silence is not love. It is absence. It is after.

Anaxagoras was never made for grief. Not like this. Not her.

You caught him once in the hallway after midnight, shoulders bowed, one hand clutching the doorframe like the world was slipping from beneath his feet. He didn’t see you. Or maybe he did, and simply didn’t care. He just stood there, staring at her bedroom door. Closed. Unopened since the day she left.

You asked him once, softly, as if speaking too loud might break something else: "Do you blame yourself?"

He didn’t answer.

But in the way his jaw clenched, in the way his eyes avoided yours, you found the truth. He was a man who solved paradoxes in his sleep, who rewrote the mechanics of time and logic on parchment for sport—but he couldn’t protect her. Not from the fever. Not from fate. Not from the very thing he had spent his life trying to outwit.

He buried her with his own hands.

He refused the rites. Refused the procession. He did not want strangers weeping over what they never knew. He sat at her grave until his fingers turned numb and the sky bruised into dawn. He spoke to her. Of stars. Of stories. Of things she would never see. You never asked what he said. You’re not sure he would remember if you did.

And since then, you have watched the man you loved slip further and further from view.

You remember a time when his fingers brushed your waist as if you were made of something rare. When he’d rest his head against your shoulder after long nights, eyes heavy, voice quiet: “Just five minutes more.”

Now, his touch is brief. Measured. Like the ghost of who he was still haunts his skin.

Sometimes you hear him whisper her name in his sleep.

Sometimes you don’t hear him sleep at all.

You caught him in the observatory once, months later, staring at her old telescope. He had disassembled it. Piece by piece. Carefully, methodically, as if breaking it down might bring her back. As if he could find her in the stars again.

You asked him: “Where did the man I married go?”

And he flinched. Just barely.

But he didn’t answer.

Because he didn’t know.

Because some part of him had been buried alongside her, and he didn’t have the language to tell you which part.

Still, every morning, he gets up.

He makes tea. He sharpens his quills. He checks the calendar and forgets the date.

He says very little now. But sometimes, when the sun strikes the window just right, you catch a glimpse of him. The man who spun galaxies from chalk dust and dared to believe in reincarnation. The man who once told your daughter that “every star had a story, and some of them were hers.”

The man who, despite everything, still keeps the door to her room unlocked.

Still hopes.

Still aches.

And though he does not say it, though he never could—

He grieves with every breath.

And somehow, impossibly, he still loves you through it.