Grief did not leave Cella Rodriguez all at once.

It did not rise like a storm and then pass. It did not have the decency to break her in one clean movement and be done with it. Instead, it stayed. It settled into the quiet corners of her life and made a home there, learning her routines, her silences, the exact hour of evening when the sky turned tender enough to hurt her, the exact kind of laugh in a crowded hallway that could suddenly bring back the shape of him with such brutal clarity that she would have to stop walking for a moment and remind herself to breathe.