9. Ghosts of Zoe
GHOSTS OF ZOE
RILEY
The photo album landed on the kitchen table with a soft thump, sending dust into the sunlight. Ava sneezed. I laughed before I could stop myself, and she looked offended before her mouth twitched.
"That was not funny," she said.
"No," I agreed. "Extremely serious dust attack."
She gave me a look so grown-up I almost expected her to ask for my credentials, then opened the album.
I had only been helping her find construction paper for an ocean-animal project. Somehow, the search had taken us through a pantry cabinet, a drawer full of candles, and finally to this album tucked behind a stack of placemats.
"That's Mommy," Ava said.
My throat tightened. "She's beautiful."
Ava studied the picture. "She was bossy."
The word startled a laugh out of me. "Was she?"
"Daddy said she bossed the ocean. She said the waves were being dramatic and needed to calm down."
The next photo showed Zoe on a beach, one hand on her hip, scowling at Luca as he stood half in frame, shirtless and grinning like he had done something unforgivable.
"She did not like pictures before coffee," Ava said.
"That seems fair."
"She also burned pancakes. She said pancakes were a scam because they looked easy but had secret rules."
This time I laughed softer, caught around something tender and complicated.
For weeks, Zoe had existed in my mind like a portrait in a locked hallway. Beautiful. Untouchable. The woman Luca had loved so deeply he'd built a wall around the space she left behind. I'd imagined her graceful where I was clumsy, patient where I came apart.
But here she was, glaring at a camera. Burning pancakes. Arguing with waves.
Human.
A shadow shifted at the kitchen entrance. Luca stood there in workout clothes, damp hair pushed back, his hand frozen on the doorframe. His gaze went to the album without anger. He looked as though he'd found a ghost sitting at his table.
Ava kept turning pages. "Daddy, remember when Mommy threw the remote?"
Luca blinked once. "She tossed it with feeling."
"At the wall."
"It was a bad game."
There was grief in his face, yes. But something else too. Reluctant warmth, slipping through before pain could catch it.
Ava touched one photo. "Then her head broke."
The room went silent. I kept my voice soft. "The balloon in her brain?"
Ava nodded. "Daddy said it was like a balloon in her brain nobody knew was there."
Luca crossed the room slowly. "That's enough album for today, piccola."
Ava looked up. "But Riley likes her."
His eyes met mine.
"Yes," I said, because it was the truth and somehow also a confession. "I do."
Luca's jaw tightened as if my answer had hit somewhere softer than he expected.
Ava didn't notice. She had already moved on to the next page, humming under her breath while her small fingers traced the edge of a picture where Zoe was wearing oversized sunglasses and a sunhat that looked like it belonged on a movie star hiding from the press.
"Snack," Luca said, his voice low but controlled. "Blueberries are washed."
Ava looked at him for a beat, measuring the change in him with that quiet precision of hers. Then she closed the album with careful hands. "Can Riley keep looking?"
Luca's hand went still on the back of the chair.
"I can put it away," I said quickly.
"No." He swallowed. "It's fine."
Ava slid off the chair and carried her little bowl from the counter to the breakfast nook, her world reorganizing itself around fruit and whatever cartoon song she had stuck in her head.
Luca stayed beside the table, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him, the storm he was trying to hold behind his ribs.
"She didn't die at the hospital," he said.
I looked up slowly.
He stared at the album, not at me. "People assume that. That there were machines. Doctors. Time to say things." His mouth pulled tight. "There wasn't."
My fingers curled against my palm beneath the table.
"It was morning." His voice roughened on the word. "Ava was still asleep. Zoe had been complaining about a headache the night before, but she hated making a big deal out of anything medical. Said she probably needed water and less of my bad attitude."
A breath escaped him, almost a laugh, except it had no air in it.
"I went for a run," he continued. "Twenty-six minutes. I know because I checked my time when I got back. Like that mattered." His eyes flicked toward the hallway, toward a memory I couldn't see. "She was on the bathroom floor."
My heart dropped so hard it felt physical.
"Luca."
"I tried CPR. Called 911. Yelled at the operator like she could make my hands work better.
" His own hands flexed once, big and scarred and useless in the memory.
"I had been in cages with men trying to break my face.
I knew what to do when blood was involved.
Broken bones. Choking. Anything." He finally looked at me. "But I couldn't make her wake up."
The kitchen hummed around us—the refrigerator running, a cartoon murmuring from the breakfast nook, Ava quietly crunching blueberries. And Luca stood there like he was still on that bathroom floor.
The impulse came so fast I had to press my hand harder against my own knee to stop it. Not because touching him felt wrong, exactly. Because touching Luca had never been neutral. Even comfort had a temperature with him.
Instead, I stayed still.
"I'm sorry," I said.
His gaze dropped, and for a second I thought he might step back into the hallway and lock this whole moment away where he kept everything else. But he didn't.
"I should have been there," he said.
The words landed with the blunt force of a confession.
"You were gone twenty-six minutes."
His mouth hardened. "Long enough."
"No." My voice came out firmer than I expected. Ava was still in the other room, so I kept it low, but something protective rose in me anyway. "Long enough to go for a run. Not long enough to cause what happened."
His eyes flashed to mine. It was the kind of look that warned people not to come closer. I recognized it now. The stillness. The controlled breathing. The way his body made itself into a locked door.
But underneath it, he looked wrecked. Not dramatic. Not broken in some obvious, easy way. Just worn down by three years of standing guard over a moment he could never change.
"You don't know that," he said.
"I know you loved her."
His throat worked.
"And I know you would have done anything to save her if you could."
The kitchen went so quiet even Ava's cartoon seemed far away.
Luca looked toward the table again, at the album with Zoe's fingerprints buried somewhere in its pages. "Anything doesn't matter when it isn't enough."
There it was. Not the perfect dead wife. Not the impossible shadow I had been afraid of. Not some comparison I could never survive. It was punishment.
He wasn't keeping Zoe on a pedestal no one else could reach. He was keeping himself beneath the weight of losing her, as though loving her should have made him powerful enough to defeat biology, fate, one fragile vessel in her brain.
Maybe that was why he watched Ava so closely. Why every change in routine put his body on alert. Why feeling anything he couldn't control seemed like another disaster waiting for him to turn his back.
To Luca, love wasn't only loss. It was twenty-six minutes.
"You're allowed to have survived it," I said.
He stared at me. I hadn't meant to say it. Not like that. Not so plainly that it stripped the air between us clean.
His expression changed by almost nothing. A faint tightening around his eyes. A small shift in his shoulders, like I had put my hand on a bruise he hadn't admitted was there.
"Don't," he said quietly.
I nodded, though I didn't know what part he meant.
Don't comfort me. Don't forgive me. Don't see me.
But I did see him. Worse, I was starting to understand him. And that made wanting him feel less like recklessness and more like stepping toward a man who had been alone in a locked room for years, refusing to call it a prison because he had built it with love.
By bedtime, the house had gone too soft.
That was the only way I knew how to describe it. The kitchen had been cleaned. The photo album had disappeared from the table. Ava's construction paper ocean animals were spread across the island to dry—all glitter glue and crooked fins. Everything looked normal again.
Except Luca had barely spoken for an hour.
He moved through Ava's routine with quiet precision: pajamas, teeth, water in the cup beside her bed. The closet door was open exactly four inches because shadows were less alarming that way. The night-light was on the blue setting, not green. The stuffed sea turtle tucked against her left side.
I stood near the doorway, pretending I was only there in case Ava needed me, not because I didn't trust Luca to be alone with all that quiet.
Ava sat upright beneath her pale lavender comforter, watching him smooth the blanket over her knees.
"Daddy?"
"Yeah, piccola."
"Did Mommy know she was going to die?"
Luca's hand stopped. For one terrifying second, nothing in the room moved except the slow turn of the ceiling fan. I felt the question like a small, sharp thing slipping between my ribs.
He lowered himself onto the edge of the bed carefully, like his body had forgotten how to bend. "No," he said. "She didn't know."
Ava considered that, her fingers rubbing the satin tag on her turtle. "Did it hurt?"
His face changed, not much. Anyone else might have missed it. But I saw the tiny collapse behind his eyes, the way his mouth softened and hardened again before a sound could escape.
"I don't think so," he said. "The doctors said it was very fast."
"Fast like blinking?"
"Fast like blinking."
Ava nodded, but her brows pulled together. "I remember the song wrong."
Luca's eyes closed for half a second. "What song?"
"The Mommy song." Ava looked down at the turtle. Her voice went smaller, careful with embarrassment. "She sang, 'Little fish, little moon, swim back home to me soon.' But I don't know the next part."