There were nights she’d double over in the middle of the kitchen with her hands over her face, floored by the weight of it. Trying to breathe in shallow handfuls of breaths. On nights like this, though she would try to quiet the thought, she always thought of Isa.
She felt her heart roam across the distance to curl up beside him. She closed her eyes and pictured him, lying there beside her. The sound of his breath, the soft rise and fall of his chest.
Isa. I’m scared. Are you still there?
But she knew there would be no answer. So instead, she said something else. Quietly, into the empty dark, “Today I stopped a boy on the street because he had your same color hair. I see you everywhere, in everyone.”
She tried not to wonder where he was, or what he might have become.
On nights like th
