—Emmie, are you even breathing in there? Perhaps you could at least untangle yourself from the couch today? We’re treading on shadows! — Valentina flung the breakfast tray onto the coffee table like it were a bird in flight.
It crumpled with a hollow *thunk*, porridge teetering on the edge of its bowl. Emmie didn’t so much as blink. She lay curled under a woolen blanket, face-down into her mobile, as though the universe had muted her. Her hair resembled a tangle of dead ivy, roots broadcasting rebellion. A t-shirt with a partially faded slogan hung loose on her frame.
“Do I resemble a housemaid to you?” Valentina demanded, hands planted on her hips. “You don’t scrub clean, you don’t lift a finger—truly, I’m out of spoons for this charade!” Her voice wavered between exasperation and something brittle, like a teacup threatening to shatter. “We’re not nannies in this house, my dear. We’ve fed enough corpses to know when one’s pretending.”
Emmie slid the phone beneath her pillow without meeting her mother’s gaze. Slowly, laboriously, she sat up, a marionette regaining strings. With a spoon, she dipped into the porridge, chewing as if the act required a permit. Each motion stretched like taffy.
“Does no part of you think this is enough?” Valentina whispered, her voice softening to a blade’s edge. “Three months, Emmie. Three. The mourning should’ve wilted by now.”
Emmie didn’t answer. She ate, slow as a snail tracing a path through rain.
Once, she had burned with a different rhythm. Not a fire, but a steady glow. At university, she’d balanced books and bar shifts, her confidence as unshakable as a clock’s tick. “She’s got *spine*,” Valentina had told friends, pride in her tone. “No shrinking violet like me. Emmie’ll carve her way through anything.”
Emmie did. Just not what was intended.
First was Simon. Poor soul, according to her. In truth, a manlodging in a basement, surviving on takeaways and borrowed time. She’d hand him passport stew, money for temazepam, and insisted he return to college. What she received in turn? Meltdowns, IOUs, and murmurs like, “You’re my sunrise, Em. No one sees my worth like you do.”
Then came Julian. A poet with a library of unread books and a refusal to pick up the phone for days. He’d reappear with daffodils and half-formed apologies. Emmie left him on a Tuesday, though it wasn’t clear until June.
And then—Daniel. The one Valentina called the *second coming*. Well-heeled, with a car that smelled like leather and danger. Weddings were supposed to sparkle like fairy lights, yet theirs dissolved into a civil ceremony in a registry office. No confetti, just a signed parchment and a cutting of tea. Valentina had simmered, though she said only, “Perhaps she’s frightened of loss,” to Paul.
Daniel unraveled quicker than a half-knitted scarf. By week five, their bed had split into twin islands. By six, she found his messages to someone named *Rose*. He shrugged as though it were a betrayal of weather.
“I lost interest in a serious project,” he said, his words polished to indifference. “You’ve become… static. Not fun anymore.”
She returned to her parents like a ghost, clutching a coat hem sodden with rain. Somewhere in the void, she’d shed both self-worth and the instinct to chase it.
“Emmie,” Valentina tried again, voice fraying. “I’ve stopped mourning for you. You’re a grown woman. Divorce isn’t death, for heaven’s sake.”
Emmie’s eyes drifted open—glassy, smudged with shadows. She shrugged with the weight of a sinking ship.
That evening, silence pooled in the flat. Even the radio’s static had ceased. Paul’s fingers drummed a restless rhythm on the table while Valentina carved roast beef into shards.
“Shall we wrap the meat in tin foil and call it a day?” Paul muttered. “She’ll rot like a vegetable if we don’t prune her.”
Valentina didn’t answer. She’d already considered the specter of specialists, of priests with incense and silver crosses.
“Perhaps a *holiday*,” Paul suggested, the word sharp as a backhand. “Cut the purse strings, see what floats or drowns. Otherwise, we’re just watering a wilting plant.”
Two mornings later, they stood in Emmie’s room. Valentina held a keyring like a relic. Paul, a lease agreement.
“We’ve rented you a flat,” Valentina said. “For a month. It’s in Middlesborough. The kettle works, at least.”
Emmie blinked, keys hovering like a question mark in the air. Paul nodded, a manager closing a ledger.
“You’re a grown woman, Emma,” Valentina added, voice cracking on the old nickname. “We won’t suffocate you with care.”
The flat was a limbo of peeling paint and silence. Emmie slept in hours, blinked at walls that bled into each other. By day three, hunger pushed her out to the shops. She bought tinned soup, a loaf the bread merchant called “crunchy,” and a bag of limes. Cooking felt like solving a riddle.
By week two, she’d applied for a call center job. Her uniform—waist-high to her knees—snapped shut with a plastic hiss. The manager, a woman named Sharon with a companion dog named Bob, hired her without batting an eye.
One Sunday, she returned to her parents’ home with a bag of polka-dot sweets and a jar of marmalade.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, as if confessing to a ghost. “I was… fog. But it’s lifting.”
Valentina let out a slow breath, the tension unraveling.
“Just… one rule, love,” she said. “No men for now. I’m too fragile for another funeral.”
Emmie smiled, but it never reached those hollow cheeks.
That night, she sat before her laptop, coat like a cape. A new job listing blinked on the screen: *Project Manager*. The qualifications? Experience, a decade of it.
Still, she typed her name into the form and hit send.