“Death doesn’t come when someone stops breathing. It comes when the world keeps breathing without them.” — Seren Amaris, in a note found between loose pages ______________________________________
The phone remained on the floor for almost ten minutes.
Aurel didn’t know that. He didn’t know how long he had spent on his knees in the middle of the living room, one hand braced against the cold floor and the other clutching his own chest, as if he could stop something from escaping. The apartment had gone silent in a way he had never heard before. It wasn’t the ordinary silence of afternoons when Seren went out to take care of something and he stayed behind to work. It was another kind of silence. Lower. Heavier. A silence that seemed to have taken her place before he even understood that she wasn’t coming back.
On the computer screen, the couple from the shoot was still smiling.
Aurel looked at them without really seeing them. Two young, beautiful, happy people suspended in the moment when white petals fell around their faces. The bride had her head tipped back, laughing. The groom looked at her as if he were standing before the final answer to every question in life.
Aurel thought about deleting the photo.
Not because the photo was bad. It was good. Technically good. The light was right, the framing worked, the emotion looked real. Maybe they would like it. Maybe they would put it in a frame. Maybe, thirty years from now, they would show it to their children, then their grandchildren, saying that it had been one of the happiest days of their lives.
He wanted to hate them for that.
He couldn’t.
So he hated the image.
He hated the cruel ease with which a photograph pretended to defeat time. He hated that preserved moment, that untouched happiness, that laugh that would never grow old while Seren, somewhere in the city, had already been reduced to procedures, documents, phone calls, and a sentence spoken by a police officer.
She didn’t make it.
Aurel got to his feet with difficulty. His body seemed to belong to someone else, someone heavier and less obedient. He picked up the phone from the floor. The screen was cracked in one corner. There were three missed calls from the same number and a voicemail.
He didn’t listen to it.
He opened the messaging app.
His last conversation with Seren was still there, clean, absurd, untouched.
You promised you’d be back before lunch.
Then I’ll be back.
Aurel touched the screen with his thumb, running it over the last sentence as if he could feel her hand through the glass. He read it once more. Then again. Then again.
The sentence didn’t change.
Neither did reality.
The phone began vibrating again.
Ícaro Valen.
Aurel stared at his friend’s name. For a few seconds, he thought about not answering. If he didn’t answer, maybe nothing would have to be said. Maybe the news could stay trapped inside him, small enough not to become real. But the phone kept vibrating, insistent, almost violent.
He answered.
“Aurel?” Ícaro’s voice came hurriedly, traffic noise filling the background. “Man, I just saw the news. I’ve called you like three times. Was Seren in that bank?”
Aurel opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
“Aurel?”
He tried to speak, but his throat felt sealed shut.
“Aurel, for God’s sake, talk to me.”
The word came out shapeless.
“Yes.”
Silence fell on the other end.
“She…” Ícaro took a deep breath. “Is she okay?”
Aurel looked toward the kitchen.
The mug Seren had used that morning sat near the sink. An almost invisible lipstick mark stained the rim. He thought he should wash it. Then he thought he should never wash it. Then he realized he was thinking about the mug because he couldn’t think about her body.
“No,” he said.
Ícaro didn’t answer right away. Aurel heard a horn, someone shouting in the distance, an engine revving. Then he heard his friend say, more quietly:
“Where are you?”
“Home.”
“Don’t leave. I’m coming.”
“I need to go.”
“Go where?”
Aurel closed his eyes.
“Identify the body.”
The sentence sounded as if it had been spoken by someone else.
Ícaro muttered a curse, as if he had turned his face away from the phone.
“I’m going with you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Shut up, Aurel. I’m going with you.”
The call ended before Aurel could answer.
He stood in the middle of the living room, holding the phone to his ear even after the sound disappeared. Somewhere in the neighborhood, someone laughed. An ordinary, brief laugh, maybe coming from the apartment next door. The sound crossed the wall and entered his home like an insult.
Seren was dead.
And someone was laughing.
There was no justice in that. No logic. Not even decency.
The world should have stopped.
But the world never stopped.
Aurel walked to the bedroom. He needed to change clothes, though he didn’t know why. He was wearing a dark T-shirt and jeans. Clothes sufficient to receive the worst news of his life, but apparently not sufficient to confirm that it was real. He opened the closet and stared at the hanging clothes.
Seren’s clothes took up half the space.
Dresses, blouses, coats, a yellow jacket she had bought on impulse and wore whenever she wanted to defy gray days. Her scent was still there, caught in the fabric, mixed with soap, paper, coffee, and something Aurel had never known how to name but would recognize anywhere.
He touched the sleeve of a blue dress.
The night Seren had worn it, they had gone to the birthday party of someone neither of them particularly liked. She had spent the entire party making quiet comments in his ear about bad conversations, soulless food, and people who laughed too loudly to seem interesting. On the way back, they had eaten french fries in the car in a gas-station parking lot, and she had said that maybe happiness was just that: leaving early from places you didn’t want to be.
Aurel clenched the fabric.
Something inside him gave way.
It wasn’t a beautiful cry. It wasn’t silent. It came as if his body had been torn open all at once. He pulled the dress against his chest and dropped to the bedroom floor, his back against the open closet, his face buried in the fabric. The sound that came out of him seemed to belong to a wounded animal.
There was no word for it.
Only absence.
When Ícaro arrived, he found the door unlocked.
“Aurel?”
There was no answer.
His friend entered slowly, closing the door behind him. Ícaro was tall, broad-shouldered, with short black hair and permanent stubble that made him look more tired than he really was. He worked as a sound designer at a small studio and was always saying that a city could be recognized by the noise it made at night. He liked bad jokes, spicy food, and pretending he was less sentimental than he was.
When he saw Aurel on the bedroom floor, his expression changed.
He said nothing at first.
He only approached, knelt in front of him, and placed a hand on his shoulder.
“I’m here.”
Aurel tried to breathe.
“She said she’d be back before lunch.”
Ícaro closed his eyes for a moment.
“I know.”
“She promised.”
“I know.”
“She wrote it. It’s on the phone. She wrote that she’d be back.”
Ícaro gripped his shoulder more firmly, not to comfort him, but to keep some part of Aurel connected to the world.
“Come on. I’ll drive.”
Aurel didn’t want to move. Moving seemed like accepting that there was a next step. And if there was a next step, then this was real. Life had already arranged a sequence after her death. Call. Clothes. Car. Morgue. Signature. Coffin. Funeral. Grave.
No.
He didn’t want to enter that sequence.
But Ícaro helped him stand anyway.
On the way out of the bedroom, Aurel stopped in front of the nightstand. He opened the drawer and took Seren’s note. He folded it carefully and slipped it into his jacket pocket.
Ícaro saw, but didn’t comment.
Some things shouldn’t be touched.
The trip to the Forensic Medical Institute took place in a kind of false world.
Aurel sat in the passenger seat, staring out the window. The city passed in blurs: buildings, traffic lights, motorcycles, street vendors, crowded buses, crooked signs, people carrying bags, people crossing streets, people talking on the phone. Everything went on. Everything insisted on being normal.
At an intersection, the car stopped beside a newsstand. Aurel saw the headline beginning to appear on the screens hanging outside.
BANK ROBBERY ENDS WITH WOMAN KILLED AT BANK BRANCH
A dead woman.
Not Seren.
Not a writer. Not a fiancée. Not a daughter. Not a woman who hated bland sauce and tucked notes inside books. Not someone who had promised to be back before lunch.
A dead woman.
The world’s language was a second act of violence.
Ícaro noticed where he was looking and sped up when the light changed.
“Don’t look at the news right now.”
“Did they arrest anyone?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ícaro.”
His friend kept his eyes on the road.
“I read it quickly. Three arrested. One got away.”
Aurel turned his head slowly.
“One got away?”
“That’s what it said.”
“Who shot her?”
“Aurel…”
“Who shot her?”
“I don’t know.”
Aurel turned back to the window. For a few seconds, the pain made room for something else. Small, cold, concentrated. It wasn’t full anger yet. It was anger in its first form. A hard seed buried beneath the shock.
Someone had shot her.
A person.
Not chance. Not fate. Not the world. A hand had held a gun. A finger had pulled a trigger. A man or a woman had decided, out of fear, cruelty, haste, or stupidity, that Seren’s life could end there.
Aurel clung to that because it was more bearable than the emptiness.
If someone had done it, then his pain had a direction.
The Forensic Medical Institute stood on an ugly street, behind an old administrative building, with walls that were too pale and windows that were too narrow. The place had a coldness that had nothing to do with temperature. Everything there seemed designed to keep emotion from finding anything to hold on to. Counter, hallways, signs, doors, plastic chairs. Suffering went in and was turned into a form.
Ícaro spoke to the receptionist because Aurel couldn’t.
“Aurel Veyr,” his friend said. “He came to… identify Seren Amaris.”
The woman behind the counter looked up with a practiced expression. She wasn’t insensitive. Maybe precisely because she wasn’t insensitive, she had learned to hide almost everything.
“Identification, please.”
Aurel handed over his wallet without knowing which document she needed. She took it, typed something, and asked them to wait.
The wait lasted a short time.
Or perhaps it lasted an entire lifetime.
A man in a lab coat appeared through a side door. He had gray hair and eyes that avoided lingering on people’s faces.
“Mr. Veyr?”
Aurel stood.
Ícaro stood with him.
“I’m going with him,” he said.
The man hesitated for a second, then nodded.
“This way.”
The hallway was colder than the reception area. White lights made everything look excessively sharp. Aurel hated it. He wanted shadow. He wanted some blurriness, some visual mercy. But there was nowhere for reality to retreat to there.
They stopped in front of a metal door.
The man in the lab coat turned to him.
“I need to warn you that there was a gunshot wound. We did everything possible to preserve her appearance, but…”
Aurel raised his hand.
“No.”
The man fell silent.
“Don’t talk about her like that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t talk about her as if she were…” Aurel didn’t finish.
Ícaro touched his back.
“Breathe.”
Aurel breathed.
The air entered like glass.
The door opened.
The room was small, clean, silent. A gurney stood in the center, covered by a white sheet. Beneath the fabric was a human shape. Nothing more.
Aurel looked at the sheet and understood, with unbearable clarity, that the human mind was a cowardly machine. It understood little by little what would destroy it all at once. Until then, Seren had still been a news report, a sentence, a phone call, an impossible absence. Beneath that sheet, she was beginning to become a body.
The medical examiner held the edge of the fabric.
“Are you ready?”
Aurel didn’t answer.
There was no honest answer to that.
The man pulled the sheet down to the level of her chest.
Seren was there.
And the world ended again.
Aurel expected blood. He expected horror. He expected something that would justify the violence of the news. But her face was almost serene. Too pale, yes. Too still. Her lips colorless. Her lashes resting against her skin as if she were sleeping after a long night. There was a small mark near her nose, the same mark Aurel had photographed so many times without her knowing. A lock of hair had fallen out of place, touching her forehead.
Aurel wanted to fix it.
He took a step.
The medical examiner moved as if to stop him, but Ícaro made a discreet gesture. The man stopped.
Aurel touched her hair.
It was cold.
Not cold like hands chilled on a rainy day. Not the living cold that could be warmed between fingers. It was another kind of cold. A final cold. A cold that didn’t ask for a blanket.
Aurel pulled his hand away as if burned.
“Seren,” he whispered.
She didn’t answer.
Of course she didn’t answer.
But some stupid part of him had waited for it.
Aurel leaned in slightly, studying her face, searching for a flaw in the scene. A small movement of the eyelid. A tremor in her lip. Anything that would reveal a bureaucratic mistake, a mix-up, a monstrous lie.
Nothing.
Seren remained still, obedient to death in a way she had never been obedient in life.
“Is it her?” the medical examiner asked softly.
Aurel heard the question, but it made no sense. Is it her? As if there could be any doubt. As if the love of his life could be confused with someone else in a cold room.
He tried to answer.
His voice failed.
Ícaro answered for him, but his voice came out broken too:
“It’s her.”
The medical examiner nodded respectfully and covered Seren again.
Aurel wanted to rip the sheet away. Not to see her, but because covering her felt like a second goodbye, and he hadn’t authorized the first.
“No,” he said.
Ícaro held him.
“Aurel.”
“Don’t cover her.”
“Aurel.”
“She doesn’t like the cold.”
The sentence came out before he could think. Ridiculous, childish, true. Seren slept bundled up even in summer. She stole blankets. She pressed her cold feet against his legs just to hear him complain.
She doesn’t like the cold.
Ícaro hugged Aurel before he could fall.
This time, Aurel didn’t cry loudly.
It was worse.
He simply stopped resisting. His body went limp against his friend. His eyes remained open and dry, fixed on the covered gurney. The pain had gone so deep that it had passed beyond tears and reached a place without expression.
When they left the room, Bastian Ravel was waiting in the hallway.
Aurel recognized him by his voice before he understood his face. He was a man in his early forties, tall, with dark hair beginning to gray at the temples. He wore a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a badge clipped to his belt. He didn’t have the theatrical bearing of a movie cop. He simply looked tired. Tired of places like this, of news like this, of people who walked in whole and walked out missing some part of themselves.
“Mr. Veyr,” he said.
Aurel stood still.
Ícaro stepped half a pace in front of him on instinct.
“Not now.”
Bastian looked at him, then at Aurel.
“I understand. I’ll be brief.”
“No,” Ícaro said. “You don’t understand. Nobody understands. He just saw—”
“Ícaro,” Aurel interrupted.
His friend looked at him.
Aurel kept his eyes on the police officer.
“Who shot her?”
Bastian didn’t answer immediately. That hesitation was enough to feed the anger.
“Who shot her?” Aurel repeated.
“We’re still determining the exact sequence of the shots.”
“There are cameras in the bank.”
“We have footage, yes.”
“Then you know.”
“The footage is partial. There was movement, panic, people on the floor. Three suspects were arrested near the scene. A fourth managed to escape.”
“The one who got away—did he shoot her?”
“Mr. Veyr…”
“Who shot her?”
“I can’t say that right now.”
“But can you deny it?”
Silence.
Aurel felt the cold seed grow a little larger.
“What’s his name?”
“Mr. Veyr—”
“His name.”
“I’m not going to give you that information.”
Aurel laughed once. A short sound without humor.
“She’s dead in a room behind you, and you’re worried about procedure?”
Something crossed Bastian’s face. Not exactly guilt. Maybe exhaustion. Maybe agreement he couldn’t show.
“I’m worried about not turning your pain into another tragedy.”
Aurel took a step toward him.
“My tragedy already happened.”
Ícaro caught his arm.
“Aurel.”
Bastian didn’t back away.
“I know that right now you want a direction for your hatred. I would too. But if you act on that anger, you’ll destroy what’s left of your life.”
“What’s left?”
The question hung in the hallway.
Bastian had no answer.
Because there was no answer that wouldn’t sound like an insult.
The officer took a card from his pocket and handed it to Ícaro, not Aurel.
“When he’s able to talk, call me. We need to take his statement. Confirm times. Last conversations. Any detail could help.”
Aurel looked at the card in his friend’s hand.
“Detail?”
Bastian looked back at him.
“Yes.”
“She texted me that she’d be back.”
His voice came out too quietly.
Bastian waited.
“Before lunch,” Aurel continued. “She promised.”
The officer’s expression changed. Very slightly. But Aurel saw it. Photographers noticed things like that. Small contractions. Eyes hardening. Jaws holding back words.
“I’m sorry,” Bastian said.
Aurel hated those words.
I’m sorry.
As if pain could be shared out of politeness. As if a polished phrase could touch even the surface of what had happened. As if the whole world wasn’t abusing that expression to end conversations with the dead.
He walked past the officer without answering.
In the parking lot, the sun was still shining.
Aurel stopped when he realized it.
The sun was still shining.
There were no heavy clouds, no thunder, no rain, no torn-open sky. It was a clear, almost beautiful afternoon. The kind of afternoon when Seren would have said the light was good for urban photography if she felt like teasing him. The kind of afternoon Aurel would normally have made use of.
He looked up and felt a stupid anger toward the sky.
Ícaro unlocked the car.
“Come on.”
Aurel got in.
His friend started the engine but didn’t pull out immediately. He kept his hands on the wheel, staring ahead.
“Do you want me to call your parents?”
Aurel closed his eyes.
His parents.
Marcel and Elianor Veyr lived forty minutes away, in an old house full of plants that his mother tended as if each one had its own temperament. His father was a reserved man, the kind who showed love by fixing broken things, quietly paying bills, and asking whether the car had been serviced. His mother cried during bad movies and pretended to believe him when Aurel said he was eating properly.
He couldn’t imagine her voice receiving that news.
“I’ll call,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“No.”
Ícaro waited.
Aurel picked up his phone. The cracked screen reflected part of his face. For a moment, he didn’t recognize the man there. Sunken eyes. Pale skin. A shapeless mouth. He looked like someone who had aged in an hour.
He called his mother.
Elianor answered on the second ring.
“Hi, sweetheart. Is everything okay?”
The question almost killed him.
Aurel squeezed his eyes shut.
“Mom.”
Something in her silence changed immediately.
“What happened?”
He tried to say it.
He couldn’t.
“Aurel?”
“It’s Seren.”
Elianor went quiet. In the background, he heard the distant sound of a television, then the volume dropping. Maybe his father was in the room. Maybe his mother had stood up too quickly.
“What about Seren?”
Aurel opened his eyes.
“She died.”
The sentence came out whole.
Cruel.
Irreparable.
The sound that came from the other end of the line wasn’t exactly a cry. It was a broken breath, as if Elianor had forgotten for a moment how to take in air.
“No,” she said.
Aurel looked at the dashboard.
“It was the bank robbery.”
“No, sweetheart.”
“I just…” He couldn’t finish. “I just identified her.”
His mother began to cry. In the background, Marcel asked something. Elianor tried to answer, but her voice failed. There was noise, footsteps, the phone changing hands.
“Aurel?” His father’s voice was hard with shock.
“Dad.”
“Where are you?”
“At the Forensic Medical Institute.”
Marcel took a deep breath. Aurel imagined his father putting a hand to his face, closing his eyes, trying to find a concrete task inside the horror.
“Is Ícaro with you?”
“He is.”
“Don’t be alone. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“We’re coming.”
“You don’t have to.”
“We’re coming.”
Aurel almost laughed. Everyone said that. You don’t have to. I’m coming. As if presence were a tool. As if someone could get close enough to hold what was falling apart.
But he didn’t argue.
“Okay.”
His father stayed silent for a few seconds.
When he spoke again, his voice was different. Lower.
“Son… I’m sorry.”
Aurel ended the call before he had to hear it again.
Ícaro said nothing. He only drove.
On the way back, Aurel received a call from Seren’s mother.
Vera Amaris.
He stared at the name on the screen until the phone nearly stopped ringing. He didn’t want to answer. He couldn’t. There was a particular cruelty in speaking to the mother of the dead woman. Her pain was similar, but not the same. Older. More foundational. Vera had known Seren before her first smile, before her first word, before any love Aurel could claim.
And now the two pains would have to face each other.
He answered.
“Ms. Vera.”
There was only crying on the other end.
Aurel closed his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and the words came so broken they sounded like stones falling. “Aurel, my girl…”
He gripped the phone tightly.
My girl.
Aurel couldn’t speak.
“She was happy with you,” Vera continued. “She was so happy. She called me yesterday talking about the wedding, the music, that dress she still didn’t want to show anyone.”
Aurel felt his entire body go rigid.
The dress.
Seren had a wedding dress hidden somewhere? Of course she did. Proof of her future was scattered throughout the world, things bought for a life that would never happen. A dress. Invitations. Plans. A guest list. Maybe a folder of references. Maybe words she would write in her vows.
The future didn’t disappear all at once.
It remained scattered in useless objects.
“I couldn’t save her,” Aurel said.
The sentence came out without planning.
Vera cried harder.
“My son, you weren’t there.”
Exactly.
That was the worst part.
He hadn’t been there.
Seren had died in a room full of strangers. Maybe she had been afraid. Maybe she had reached for her phone. Maybe she had thought of him. Maybe she had waited for someone to do something. Maybe, in the last second, she had realized she wouldn’t be back before lunch.
And he had been editing wedding photos.
“I should have been there,” he said.
“Don’t say that.”
“I should have been there.”
“Aurel, please.”
But he didn’t know how to stop speaking to guilt now that it had found a sentence.
I should have been there.
When they reached the apartment, Ícaro parked and turned off the car, but didn’t get out.
“You’re staying with me tonight,” he said.
“No.”
“That wasn’t a question.”
Aurel looked at him.
“I want to be alone.”
“I know. That’s why you’re not going to be.”
“Ícaro.”
“You can hate me tomorrow. Today I’m staying.”
Aurel didn’t have the strength to argue.
They went upstairs in silence.
The apartment seemed different. Not because anything had changed, but because Aurel now knew that Seren would never enter it again. And that knowledge reorganized everything. Her shoes by the door became relics. The coat over the back of the chair became a wound. The book lying open on the table became an unanswered question. The notebook in the living room seemed almost alive, waiting for the hand that would never return.
Aurel stopped in front of it.
Ícaro closed the door.
“Want some water?”
Aurel didn’t answer.
He picked up Seren’s notebook.
The black cover was warm from the light coming through the window. He sat on the couch and opened it to the last written page. He didn’t know whether he should. It felt like an invasion. But death turned privacy into ruins. What had once belonged to someone now lay abandoned, and the living had to decide whether touching it was love or violation.
Her handwriting filled half the page.
Some people believe that losing someone means watching them disappear. It doesn’t. Losing someone means continuing to find them in every place where they can no longer be.
Aurel read it once.
Then again.
Ícaro approached slowly, but didn’t try to look.
“Is it hers?”
Aurel nodded.
“Did she write it today?”
“I don’t know.”
He touched the sentence with his fingertips.
Seren had always seemed to know things that hadn’t happened yet.
That irritated him now.
“I need to hear her voice,” Aurel said.
Ícaro tensed.
“Maybe that’s not a good idea.”
“I need to.”
“Aurel…”
“I need to.”
His friend didn’t insist.
Aurel picked up the laptop. He opened the video folder.
There were hundreds.
Seren in the park. Seren in the apartment. Seren at the beach, complaining about the wind. Seren trying to cook a complicated recipe and accusing the pot of sabotage. Seren reading a bad passage from a book aloud just to make him laugh. Seren asleep on the bus. Seren saying, “Stop recording,” while smiling exactly like someone who didn’t want him to stop.
Aurel stared at the thumbnails.
Each video was a closed door to a place that no longer existed.
He clicked one.
The image appeared.
Seren was sitting on the living-room floor, wearing one of his T-shirts, her hair tied up carelessly, holding a mug.
“If you’re recording this, Aurel Veyr, know that I look like a war survivor and I do not authorize documentary material.”
Her voice filled the apartment.
Aurel stopped breathing.
On the screen, the living Seren raised her mug as if making a toast.
“But since you’re probably going to ignore my image rights, let the record show that I wrote three good pages today, you burned the toast, and our plant is officially deader than some of the relationships I had before you.”
Aurel laughed.
It wasn’t a happy laugh. It was a broken, involuntary laugh that turned into crying before it finished.
Ícaro sat beside him.
Neither of them spoke.
The video continued.
The Seren on the screen looked at the camera with a softness that cut through Aurel like a blade.
“Hi, future Aurel,” she said. “If you’re watching this because you got sentimental, that’s okay. I forgive you. But don’t spend your life looking backward, okay? You have that irritating tendency.”
Aurel slammed the laptop shut.
The silence returned.
But it wasn’t empty anymore.
Now it was worse.
Now the apartment knew exactly what sound was missing.
Ícaro ran a hand over his face.
“Man…”
“Leave,” Aurel said.
“No.”
“Leave.”
“I’m not going.”
Aurel turned toward him in a sudden burst of anger.
“I asked you to leave.”
Ícaro held his gaze, hurt but steady.
“And I said no.”
“I don’t need a babysitter.”
“Today you do.”
“You don’t understand.”
“No. I don’t understand. But I know you.”
Aurel stood.
“You do?”
“I know you well enough to know you’re going to try to drown yourself in those videos until there’s nothing left.”
“They’re mine.”
“I didn’t say they weren’t.”
“She was mine.”
The sentence came out ugly.
Possessive.
Desperate.
Ícaro stood too, more slowly.
“She was herself, Aurel.”
That struck a place the pain hadn’t reached yet.
Aurel looked at his friend as if he had betrayed him.
“Don’t say that.”
“Someone has to.”
“Get out.”
“No.”
For a moment, the two of them stood face-to-face in the middle of the room. Aurel wanted to scream, break something, throw Ícaro out, throw the world out. But there wasn’t enough strength in his anger. It collapsed before becoming movement.
He sat down again.
“I just want her back,” he said, almost without a voice.
Ícaro closed his eyes.
When he opened them, they were red.
“I know.”
“No. You don’t.”
“I know I don’t know it the way you do.”
Aurel covered his face with his hands.
“She was alive this morning.”
“I know.”
“How can someone be alive in the morning and dead in the afternoon?”
Ícaro sat beside him.
He didn’t answer.
Because some questions were holes. Throwing words into them only made the emptiness seem larger.
Night fell without either of them turning on the lights.
At some point, Ícaro ordered food. Aurel didn’t eat. At some point, his parents arrived. Elianor came in crying and hugged him so tightly that it seemed she was trying to put him back inside his body. Marcel stood behind her, pale, eyes wet, his hands useless at his sides. Then he hugged his son too, awkwardly, silently, trembling almost imperceptibly.
Aurel let them all touch him.
He felt no comfort.
Vera and Tobias Amaris came later. Tobias, Seren’s father, was a large man with a closed-off face, a wrinkled dress shirt, and the red eyes of someone who had cried before deciding he would cry no more in front of others. Vera entered clutching a purse against her chest as if she were carrying something very fragile.
When she saw Aurel, she opened her arms.
He went to her.
The two of them cried without saying anything.
Tobias remained near the door, looking around his dead daughter’s apartment. His gaze passed over the photographs, the books, the notebook on the table. There was something hard in his face. Not accusation. Not yet. But a question that might one day become poison.
Why was she alone?
No one said it.
But Aurel heard it anyway.
Later, while everyone spoke quietly in the kitchen about the funeral, documents, schedules, and things too practical for grief of that age, Aurel returned to the living room alone.
The laptop was on the table.
He opened it again.
The screen lit up.
The video folder was still there.
Hundreds of Serens.
Hundreds of closed worlds.
Aurel clicked the same video as before, but left the volume low. He watched her sitting on the floor, alive inside a luminous window. He didn’t cry this time. He only watched.
Photographs were static lies.
Videos were lies in motion.
Even so, at that moment, Aurel would have given anything to make the lie last longer.
On the screen, Seren smiled.
The video advanced to the point where she looked at the camera and said again:
“Don’t spend your life looking backward, okay?”
Aurel paused it.
Her face froze in the middle of the sentence.
A frame.
A single moment.
Aurel brought his hand close to the screen without touching it.
“I don’t want to look backward,” he whispered. “I want to go back.”
No one heard him.
In the kitchen, the living discussed how to bury the dead.
In the living room, Aurel stared at Seren trapped in light, pixels, and the past.
And, for the first time since the call, the pain found a clear shape inside him.
It wasn’t acceptance.
It wasn’t goodbye.
It was refusal.
A pure, deep, irrational refusal.
Aurel Veyr looked at the frozen image of the woman he loved and silently made the first promise that would destroy his life.
Not yet.
Not like this.
Not you.