UPSIDE DOWN

Epilogue

Luca

Grief is a strange thing. It doesn't leave quietly, it lingers in the walls, in the corners of rooms, in the faint sound of her laughter that my brain refuses to forget. 

One year has passed since Sylvie's funeral, and still, her room smells like lavender and antiseptic.

Papa's back to locking himself in his office. Andrea barely talks. Aurelio's gone cold. Matteo, he pretends. Pretends better than the rest of us. 

But I can't pretend.

Not when every night I see her face in my dreams, alive. 

Not when I wake up thinking I heard her voice down the hall.

Everyone says it's trauma. That I'm not ready to let go. Maybe they're right.

But maybe they're not.

It started two nights ago.

I was in Papa's study, trying to find the old surveillance drive from the mission, the one that had Viktor's last known locations. It wasn't supposed to exist anymore, but Papa keeps everything, buried under stacks of useless paperwork.

The house was silent, the kind of silence that hums. I pulled out a drawer, found a bunch of outdated files, mostly export permits, ledgers, supply routes. And then, at the very back, I found an envelope. Thin. Tucked behind a loose panel.

No name. No seal. Just a faint smudge of dirt across the corner, like someone had touched it with gloved hands.

I opened it.

Inside were two things, a small folded paper and a photograph.

The paper had coordinates scribbled in a handwriting I didn't recognize, rough, uneven, rushed. 

The photo... was of a hospital.

It wasn't one I knew. The building looked old, the walls gray, a Russian signboard hanging crookedly over the entrance. And standing in the far corner, barely visible through the blur of the image, was a figure in a white gown.

Dark hair. Pale skin. Bandages around her head.

Sylvie.

Or maybe just someone who looked like her. The angle was bad, the light too harsh, but my heart didn't care about logic, it knew.

I sat there for hours, staring at it under the lamp, tracing the outline of her face.

I checked the date on the back of the photo. It was printed five days after we buried her.

That's when the air left my lungs.

I didn't even realize Matteo was standing behind me until he spoke. "What's that?"

I turned quickly, trying to hide it, but his eyes caught the corner of the picture. "Luca." His voice hardened. "Don't start this again."

"I'm not starting anything," I said, too fast. "Just found something weird in Papa's files."

"Luca..." He sighed, rubbing his face. "You can't keep doing this. She's gone. We saw her body."

I looked back at the photo. "Did we?"

He flinched. Just a little. And for a second, I thought maybe he believed me.

But then he shook his head. "It's nothing. Some old Russian file. Forget it."

He walked out. And I was left sitting there, the photo burning in my hand like it was alive.

I tried to tell the others later that night. Andrea dismissed it immediately. "A distraction," she said. "That's how they operate. They'd plant false evidence just to pull us back in."