I shifted, reached for the paperback, and hesitated before sliding it into a box. The pages had always felt like home in my hands.
My father’s gaze landed on the book. Not the title—he’d never cared about titles. On the fact that I was packing it like it mattered.
He leaned forward and opened a nearby box with a careful pull of the tape. Inside were things he’d already packed. A framed photo. A small ceramic dish shaped like a shell. A stack of letters tied with twine. He took out the framed photo. Me at seven. Front tooth missing. Hair in a crooked ponytail. Smile too wide for my face. My arm thrown around his waist like I owned him.
I’d forgotten that photo existed.
He held it for a moment, thumb brushing the edge of the frame. The look on his face wasn’t theatrical. It was private. Almost stunned. Like he couldn’t understand how time could take someone from that toothless grin to a young woman folding winter coats to move to another country.
“You were fearless,” he murmured, and the word carried a weight it hadn’t earned in normal conversation. “Sempre.”
Always.
My mouth went dry. I stared at the photo and felt something sharp press behind my ribs.
Fearless wasn’t what I remembered. I remembered being small and watching the front door as if staring hard enough could keep it from becoming permanent.
My mother had left early enough that most people thought it shouldn’t still matter. But absence didn’t follow logic. It lived in the places you didn’t look directly at. The corner of a closet. The empty space in family stories. The way my father never used her name, as if speaking it might invite her back just to leave again.
I reached out and touched the frame lightly, just once, the way you touched something hot to prove you could.
My father set the photo down on top of the packing paper. He didn’t put it back in the box yet. He didn’t put it in my hands. He let it sit between us like a fragile truth.
He cleared his throat, straightened, and returned to the tape like it was safer.
I forced my voice into steadiness. “You’re going to be fine.”
His shoulders went still for half a second. “Of course.”
The lie didn’t bother either of us. It was the kind of lie you offered the people you loved when the truth was too sharp to hold without bleeding.
The rain thickened, drumming harder against the glass. Outside, the sky had gone that particular bruised gray that meant the sun was still there, somewhere, but not interested in showing itself.
A sharp buzz cut through the apartment—clean, mechanical, out of place against the softer sounds of rain and shifting boxes.
My father’s head lifted immediately, attention snapping toward the intercom panel mounted beside the door.
“Sim?” he answered, already moving before the response came.
The doorman’s voice filtered through a second later, faintly distorted but familiar. “Mr. Ribeiro, Ms. Atha is on her way up.”
Not a question.
A notice.
My father’s gaze flicked to me, something unreadable passing through it—resignation, maybe, edged with something softer. “Of course she is,” he muttered, more to himself than to the speaker.
He didn’t press the unlock button right away. He didn’t need to.
Lo didn’t wait for permission.
As if the building itself had learned her rhythm, the hallway outside filled with the sharp, unmistakable cadence of heels against polished stone—quick, certain, unapologetically loud.
A second later, the door swung open with the confidence of someone who believed doors existed to be entered dramatically.
Clementine Louis Atha stepped inside like she was arriving at an event, not into an apartment full of half-taped boxes and a girl trying not to fall apart.
Oversized sunglasses, even though it was raining. Lipstick perfect, a shade too bright for a gray afternoon. A trench coat cinched at the waist, scarf knotted with intention. She rolled a suitcase behind her that looked expensive enough to have its own passport.