Chapter 83

Diego

The wind had thinned out the flowers again. I knelt beside her grave, brushing away the leaves that had gathered. The graveyard was quiet as it always was, but this time it felt different. The warmth I felt coming through her seemed to diminish every time, as though she were unhappy with the decisions I’d made and was refusing to grant me an audience.

It was the kind of silence that crept under my clothes and held fast to my skin. It was everything about this place—the weight of memory pressing down on my chest, the fear that time had long gone and I could barely remember her, or the dread that this wasn’t the plan she would have consented to.

This place was hardly my comfort place anymore. All it did was haunt me, bringing back every mistake and every promise I never kept.

She’d been gone for years. Still, every time I came, I half expected to find her sitting on the bench behind me, laughing—that soft, knowing laugh she saved for when I was bei