I don't sleep again.
I lie in the guest room with the crackers half eaten on the nightstand and the photograph of my mother face down in my bag because I can't look at her tonight, and I think about Marco Vitelli with the specific, surgical clarity that only comes at two in the morning when there's nothing left to distract you from the truth.
Four years.
Four years of dinners and arguments and making up after arguments and building a life in the careful, incremental way that people build things when they believe they're building toward something permanent. I knew his coffee order and his mother's birthday and the specific way he laughed when something genuinely surprised him versus the performative laugh he used in groups.
I thought I knew him.
I found the texts and I thought the wors
