It had been five minutes since they stopped. And three months since she last set foot in her home.

There was silence, except for the sound of Nina’s finger tapping the steering wheel. She then directed her impatience to the floor, tapping her foot against the accelerator. It was another one of her habits that annoyed Stela, mostly because she was scared that the car would dash off into the distance. Now more than ever.

Nina inhaled sharply. Unlike Stela, she hates stillness, the kind of person who had to be doing something every single second. “Now decide. Do you want to go inside?”

Stela’s eyes were still fixated on the house. Two-story, with a miniature lawn in the front. It looked broken.

“Yes,” Stela answered, holding her gaze for a few more seconds before turning to her best friend, “Did they move everything?”

“Except for a few pieces of furniture here and there,” she said, evidently trying hard not to look concerned, “Everything.” 

Stela felt a sharp pain in her chest, which traveling down her arms, to her fingertips. They removed the cast, but the scars and stitches still hurt. She hissed as it stung, making Nina look at her once again. “I’m fine,” Stela murmured dimly, “And I will be. I just want to take a look around, it’s been ages.”

Maybe she wanted to ask a hundred more questions, and maybe she wanted to protest for hours again, but Nina only said, “Okay. I’ll take a tour around the block and be back in ten minutes. We’ll leave after, okay?”

She nodded, pushed open the door of the car and stepped outside. The air was much chillier and wrapped her in a blanket of coldness. Nina drove away and Stela walked in through the gates, stopping right in front of the door. Million suspicions, uncertainty. Finally, she turned the doorknob and opened the door to reveal the room.

It was empty. It was empty in a way that suggested nobody had ever been there. It was empty, as if the rustic walls, the abraded floor and the wooden tables were unused and untouched. Stela extended a careful hand to further open the ajar door. It resisted with a shrill creak, the sound disappearing into the air that was dense with silence. She contemplated a million things- should I go in? how long has it been? can I take it? what if they’re inside? maybe nothing ever happened, maybe— before she did what was most obvious to her. She took a step inside, then two. At that moment, her worst fear was that her worst fears would turn out to be true.

Three months. That was how long she had spent in the hospital. But why did she remember everything like it happened an hour ago? Stela stood at the center of the room. In her mind, she imagined the couch in the place that was now vacant, watching her brother and her dad fight for the remote. Right in front of her was the sinuous staircase down which descended her mother, elegant as ever, uttering her light scoldings at both of them. But that was all before it happened, before bullets hit their bodies and they fell to the floor. She hadn’t been there to next to them it, to say her last words to them. Pain struck her chest again but this time it was a different kind. Her brother was only six. She had been driving. She screeched in terror at the news she heard just as the car screeched to a halt, colliding against another vehicle. Stela stood fixed in her place.

Suddenly, something flickered around her. She looked up at the ceiling, for the first time noticing the broken chandelier that was hanging loosely. The bulb flickered, then it dimmed. Then, it went off.