Sara Ikari Rodriguez
It had been a week since the last note.
Seven days of calm.
No packages. No shadows in the alley. No poisoned poetry or pressed flowers.
The silence should have felt like relief.
And maybe… it did.
But more than that, it gave me time to see what I hadn’t been willing to before.
Him.
Matio.
He didn’t touch me much.
Didn’t say anything romantic.
Didn’t try to fix things between us with empty apologies or soft lies.
He was just there.
In the hallway.
In the chair beside mine.
On the other side of the door when I pretended not to cry.
And that presence — silent, steady, stormy — had become something I didn’t know I could miss.
Until I started missing it before it even left.
I caught him at 10 a.m., hunched over the desk, his eyes bloodshot, his coffee unt
