Chapter Forty Eight

* Jana *

The walls of my apartment felt tighter that evening, as though they too had been listening in on every word Lawrence and I had exchanged the past days. I couldn't shake the feeling that something inside him had shifted. He had always been sharp, proud, immovable, like granite that no storm could chip away. But now... there was a crack, and through it, the past was spilling out like floodwater.

I'd seen it in his eyes when he looked at me, the way he carried something he wasn't ready to speak aloud. For years I had been left with only silence, only absence. My mother's disappearance was a wound that never closed, just scarred deeper with every passing year. There was a time when Leticia told me to accept it, to move on, to stop asking. But you can't bury a ghost that doesn't rest.

I sat on the edge of my bed, my fingers curled tight around the worn photograph I always kept in my nightstand, the only picture I had of her. My mother's smile in that frame was soft, fragile, like