Gigi's question hung in the air, bitter and heavy with the weight of memory. Grace's own sundae sat half-eaten between them, melting slowly as the silence stretched. “I -- I don’t know… I’ve never really… thought about it. Not, you know, seriously,” she began, twisting the spoon in her glass, chocolate clinging stubbornly. She glanced up, caught Gigi's eyes, then looked away, chewing on the words. “But… maybe there was one thing. I was… I was ready to perform the lead in the Doe Queen. Every detail, every… every movement rehearsed. Every pas, adagio, and pirouette memorised.” She swallowed, voice tightening. “And then…” A pause, fragile, like a stage curtain trembling before it falls. “An accident...
...My first. Not just a life, but something that… I don’t know… it felt like it fed off me. My energy, my strength... a parasite."
What was she doing? This was supposed to be about regret, missed opportunity, and the ballet. And yet… why was she letting herself say this, and with chocolate still clinging to her lips? She hated therapy, hated all the forced words and neat confessions, and yet somehow this -- this was easy. Too easy. She remembered a time when it had been like that before, when brunette hair had tangled with her own, a sister… or close enough to call one. Her spoon wavered. She looked away.
“And yet… when he was born, there was this -- just a fracture of a moment -- where it felt like the three of us, together, were… our entire world. Just for an instant, everything aligned, and I could see it -- him, Emilio, me -- all of it, all of us, like we belonged nowhere else but there.”
She swallowed, the sweetness of the sundae forgotten. “After the hospital, though… I became stone. Hard. Determined to get a nanny, to make it all… manageable. But the nights,” she whispered, “the nights I found myself sneaking back into that room… not just to make sure that all that time he’d taken from me somehow gave him enough strength to get through, but to see him, to feel him there. To remember that fracture again, that tiny world we’d held together, even if only for a moment.
And as the years went on… the hardness I carried toward him… it didn’t quite soften. But it shifted. Something else replaced it. Something that made me ache for his footsteps in the hall, his breath brushing against my neck when he buried his tiny body against me, his voice entwined with mine as we hummed the songs of the ancients..."
“And then… Emilio,” she murmured, voice faltering, tasting the name like it might break her. “He… he was just gone. A car accident. Just -- ripped through everything. Me, us… all of it. And it left this… this space between me and… what I’d come to feel for Teo over the years. I don’t know if it’s grief, or shock, or… everything together, all tangled up. But it changed me. Not just harder -- something else, something uneven, jagged. I carry it like a weight I don’t know how to set down. And sometimes I wonder if I even want to.”
Her voice dropped, low and trembling. “And… and afterwards… willingness became obligation, and obligation became resentment, and resentment… it became neglect, and neglect became… abandonment. And before I even knew it, that world I’d held onto… it was gone. All that was left was a ballet I never got to perform, and a ghost that refused to let me forget him.”
She shivered slightly, a tear sliding free before she hastily wiped it away. “Hertia on that hill,” she whispered, almost to herself. “Unable to move. Unable to feel anything but the past. His ghost… chaining her there, whispering, reminding…”
A laugh, small and uneven, escaped her. She wiped at the corners of her eyes. “That opera… it always makes me cry,” she said, a weak excuse, more for herself than Giulia. Then, after a pause, she leaned a little forward, “and you… what do you regret?”
Even as the words left her mouth, a strange clarity settled over her. She hadn’t really said it before -- not aloud -- but now… she realised she did. She did, in fact, regret it.
