They left the greenhouse in silence. Matteo drove without asking where, which Fina understood, distantly, as its own kind of mercy — neither of them ready yet to arrive anywhere that required speaking to another living person. He pulled over eventually at an overlook above the river, engine off, the city's skyline hazy behind glass gone silver with late-afternoon light, and neither of them moved to get out. "She knew," Fina said finally, staring at the water instead of at him. "Every morning she had left, my mother woke up knowing that a man she'd never named to me was deciding, that morning, whether the two of us got to keep living the way we had the day before. That's not the same fear I grew up believing was the shape of her illness. That's not a woman losing her mind to a gift she couldn't control. That's a woman who understood, with total clarity, exactly what she was protecting me from, and chose, every single day she had left, to keep protecting me instead of tel
Terakhir Diperbarui : 2026-08-27
