Page 4 of Iron Roses

I hold the flowers tighter. White lilies for her. Pale roses for Mamma. The stems bite into my palm through the tissue wrap, but I don’t loosen my grip. Some pains are meant to be held.

Papà walks beside me. His back isn’t as straight as it used to be. His cane clicks against the stone path in a steady rhythm. Like a clock ticking down something we’re both too tired to name.

The mausoleum sits at the far end of the garden, carved from white marble, veins of gray streaking the archway like old scars. The Vestri name etched into the front has dulled over time. We have a man who polishes it, but the stone refuses to shine.

Two graves lie in the grass just before it. Side by side. Identical headstones.

Giovanna Lucia Fontanesi

1987 – 2011

Daughter. Sister. Promise.

Adriana Esposito Fontanesi

1964 – 2013

My knees lower to the ground. The grass is damp. The soil always feels coldest here, like it remembers.

I lay the lilies on Giovanna’s grave first. Tuck a few strands of hair behind my ear before placing the bouquet just below her name. My fingers brush the letters. Then I move to Mamma’s.

Papà doesn’t kneel.

He stands between the two headstones, staring down at the earth as if it owes him answers. His cane sinks a little into the soil, but he doesn’t adjust it.

The wind picks up. It slips beneath my coat and finds the spaces where grief still lives.

I don’t look at him. I don’t have to.

I know the shape of his silence.

I’ve worn it all my life.

When I was small, Giovanna used to braid my hair in the garden.

Her fingers were gentle, tugging each strand into place as she told stories about her boarding school in Florence. I’d sit perfectly still on the stone bench, knees scabbed, chin tipped up like a flower chasing the sun.

“You’ll be taller than me one day,” she used to say, grinning as she tied the ribbon. “And twice as stubborn.”

I never believed her. She was perfect. Beautiful. Brave. She wore silence like jewels and made me want to be just like her.

The last time she kissed my forehead, I was ten. I’d scraped my knee chasing her through the poppy field behind the estate. She’d caught me when I tripped, held me close, brushed the dirt from my cheeks with her sleeve.

“You’re my best girl,” she whispered, pressing her lips to the bruise blooming on my skin.

I believed her.

And then she married a stranger.

And then she died and Papà never cried.

He arranged the funeral with military precision, delivered a eulogy in front of a hundred stone-faced men, and then went back to work like nothing had shifted.

But I saw it.

The way he sat in her room for hours afterward. The way he left her name on his desk plate for weeks. The way he stopped looking at me altogether.

Because after Giovanna died…

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