NIKO.
Over the past few days, something inside me had shifted quietly and insistently, like a door I had sealed shut years ago had begun to creak open. I felt it in the mornings when laughter echoed through the halls instead of silence. I felt it in the evenings when the house no longer seemed to swallow me whole. And I felt it most acutely when I watched Alex with my children.
For the first time since Eliana died, life didn’t feel like something I was merely enduring. It felt like something I was living again.
I had fought it at first; this warmth, this dangerous sense of possibility. I told myself it was temporary. That Alex was here on contract. That the joy she brought was seasonal, artificial, something that would fade the moment she left. I reminded myself daily that I was suppose
