Excerpt:

The first grave arrived with a clumsy rain and a silence that no one knew how to fill. The father—husband, axis, habit—was buried with words that sounded borrowed, as if they didn’t quite belong to the scene. The family returned home with the sense of having left something open, poorly shuttered, and that rift began to widen immediately. Clocks faltered, dreams repeated themselves, and at night, someone would swear they heard footsteps where no one stood. “It’s normal,” they said. “Grief does things like that.” No one chose to notice that the ground where the body rested seemed more interested than it should have been, as if it had learned a new name.

Weeks later, the eldest son did not return from the road. A simple accident—explainable, inevitable, according to the reports. The car was mangled, the highway mute. When they placed him beside his father, someone murmured—too low—that the space between the two graves seemed to have been calculated in advance. The mother begged them not to talk nonsense. The youngest brother didn’t speak throughout the entire burial; he only asked, at the end, if they would be together now. “Yes,” they replied, not knowing whom they were truly trying to reassure. That night, the house breathed with difficulty, as if it were short of air or as if it were learning how to hold its breath.

The following month brought with it an uncomfortable certainty. Not a fear, not a suspicion: an expectation. The family began to move with caution, as if every gesture might be the next mistake. However, that which feeds on loss has no need for haste; it is enough to know that there is more to come. In the soil, beneath the twice-turned earth, something seemed satisfied—joyful, even—at the thought that they would soon return. Not out of cruelty, but for the sake of continuity. And while the family counted the days in anguish, it …

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