I did not know a human heart could keep beating after it had been torn in two. Yet here we are: Hugo, Eloise, and I, orbiting the black hole where Deborah used to stand. The world insists on carrying on with its school runs, utility bills, and small talk, while we move through it like survivors pulling ourselves from wreckage no one else can see. Their grief erupts in slammed doors, midnight sobbing, and sudden, hollow laughter; mine hides in the quiet, in the letters I write to a woman who will never read them.

But she is not entirely gone. She lives in flour-dusted memories and off-key songs, in Eloise’s stubborn tilt of the chin, in the way Hugo pauses to think before he speaks. We speak her name as liturgy, not lament. Love has simply changed shape—no longer a hand in mine, but a compass in our bones. We will never call her absence “all right.” Yet as we stumble forward, holding on to one another, we are not just mourning what ended. We are, line by fragile line, continuing the story she began.