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The breeze brushes across my face, soft and gentle, right where the tear is.

As though someone is wiping it away.

As though he is.

My chest tightens.

“I'm in Sicily, Vita. Can you see me?” I whisper.

There's no answer, of course, but somehow, standing here with the sea in front of me and everything he spent years telling me about finally surrounding me, I know he's seeing this.

“This is for you, Vita. And everything is exactly how you described it.”

I laugh through my tears.

“Even Zio Nino forcing brioche e granita on us at ungodly hours.”

I swear I can hear him laugh.

My eyes close again as the breeze moves gently across my face.

“I miss you,” I whisper into the wind.

***

The house Damiano grew up in sits on a hillside just outside Ribera, surrounded by dry grass, olive trees and a few stubborn patches of wildflowers that have somehow survived the Sicilian heat. It's a small, weathered house with faded shutters and walls that were probably white once, before years of sun and salty air turned them the colour of old cream. The roof tiles are uneven, and weeds have pushed their way through the cracks in the stone steps leading to the front door.

Beyond it, the land slopes towards the coast, where the Mediterranean stretches out beneath the morning sun, so blue it almost doesn't look real.

I stand beside the car for a moment, taking it all in.

It's everything he told me it would be.

I can almost picture him here as a little boy, running through the grass with scraped knees and that mischievous grin of his, probably getting into trouble before breakfast.

God, I wish I could have known him then.

I take out my phone and snap a picture of the house. When I open my messages, my thumb hesitates over a group chat I haven't touched in sixteen months.

Volpi - Raimondi Chat.

My stomach drops as soon as I open it.

The last messages are still there, conversations about the funeral, times and arrangements, people asking who was going where and what still needed to be done. All those ordinary, practical things that somehow still required attention when my entire world had just ended.

I never replied to any of them.

I scroll further up, past the messages about his hospital stays and the daily updates from the doctors, until I reach a photograph of the two of us in bed. A selfie we took the day before he got sick.

I shake my head and scroll away.

I scroll through the names. Nonna Antonia, my parents, Chiara, Damiano's parents.

And Damiano.

His number is still in the group.

I stare at his name for longer than I should, remembering that I never stopped paying his phone bill. Sixteen months, and every month the payment goes through like he's still going to pick up the phone one day.