I blinked, sitting up. “What’s going on? I just woke up.”
She flinched, pushing open the curtains to let in the bright morning light, and sat on the bed. “How’s baby this morning?” She asked and I smiled down at my belly. “Growing like a gremlin.” She nodded and took my hand, a tear falling down her cheek.
I prepared myself for the worst…
“There’s news. Honey – they found a part of the aircraft. Some
268 Vouchers
cargo ship en route to Australia found it.”
“What do you mean?” My stomach dropped as the words settled in, each one like a cold weight.
“They searched that area, and well – they are flying the bodies to the States, and they need us to – we need to identify them.” She swallowed, holding herself together but barely.
A whirl of emotions swirled through me, but I could barely feel them. It was like my body was working overtime, just trying to process this information and make sense of what I was supposed to do next.
“Are they sure?” My voice was a tremor of disbelief.
But that’s not how the world works, is it? I don’t get to outrun this because it’s catching up with me anyway.
has been wonderful. The lights, the city, the people – but these people, especially Marcelo, have learned to live with their grief. Even Laura has more light by the day in her, but I still feel like this gaping black hole sucks the light from everything around
–
I swallowed down the knot in my throat and wiped the tears on my cheeks. “Alright I guess we have no other options, right? This is closer – we need closure.” I mutter and pull Laura into a hug. The little light in her that started to shine was now dying again, and if we find our boys back home… I don’t know if her light will ever shine again.
Even if we didn’t admit it out loud to each other, I knew she was clinging to the granule of hope that they could have survived and had been drifting on a life raft somewhere or stuck on some island. But this wasn’t a movie, and those things rarely happen.
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