Grief had wrapped itself around me like a tight, unrelenting shroud, suffocating every breath. I could barely recognize the reflection that stared back from the mirror: pale, gaunt, empty-eyed. My frame had withered, my clothes now hung off me like they belonged to someone else. But what tore me apart the most wasn’t the weight loss.
It was the silence.
No echoes of laughter down the hallway. No tiny feet pattering across wooden floors. No soft bedtime murmurs whispering, “Mommy, I love you.”
Only a devastating void.
Then, a week ago, Hannah revealed something that didn’t just deepen my grief—it transformed it into a wildfire of rage.
Ronan was throwing an extravagant party.
For Gabriel.
His “son.”
I almost laughed at the absurdity of it. That boy? His son?
Ronan had once thrown a nearly identical celebration for Elior’s eighth birthday. I could still see the joy dancing in Elior’s eyes, the way he had gripped Ronan’s hand like he was the center of the entire universe.
And now?
Now he was doing it all over again—this time for Carmela’s child.
As though Elior had never even existed.
As if our child—born of love, abandoned by his father—was nothing more than a ghost best forgotten.