Forget Me Not

Lola-May dies the moment Isla is born.
What should have been a beginning becomes an ending, and in the stillness that follows, grief takes root.
Isla grows up in a house ruled by absence. She has her mother's mouth, her mother's hands, her mother's soft voice echoing faintly in the way she laughs. She moves the way Lola-May once moved. She even smells like her, the maids whisper. Everything about her is the same-except her eyes, which are unmistakably her father's.
Francesco cannot bear to look at her.
To him, Isla is not a child but a mirror held too close. Every smile feels like theft. Every breath feels like accusation. He tells himself she will be better off elsewhere in the house, away from his sight, away from his grief. And so he gives her over to the maids, to the quiet corners and servant corridors, and convinces himself this is mercy.
It is not.
Raised without tenderness, Isla learns to survive on obedience and silence. She becomes careful, fragile, aching for a love she does not know how to ask for. She carries her mother's face through rooms where no one wants to see it, and her father's eyes that watch from a distance and never soften.
Years pass. The house grows older. So does Isla. She becomes a living echo of the woman Francesco lost-and the child he never allowed himself to love.
Only when the house falls silent once more does Francesco finally understand what he has done. Isla was never a replacement. She was never a reminder meant to punish him. She was a child. His child. Someone entirely her own, who needed him while he was busy mourning a ghost.
By the time he reaches for her, the damage has already been done.
This is a story about grief that calcifies into cruelty, about children raised in the shadow of the dead, and about the unbearable realization that what you have forgotten to love may never forgive you for it.