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Five didn’t come back.
Not because he couldn’t. He simply didn’t want to. He stayed in the subway, convinced that Lila had only used him, that the words she had thrown at him in anger were meant for real.
It’s over, Five.
And he believed it. So he decided to disappear from her life completely.
She never got the chance to tell him that she had only tried to calm down the heated situation they had all suddenly been forced to face. The family had to cope with it on their own, just as they had with yet another apocalypse, as if it had already become their inevitable routine.
It was like losing a family member who was absolutely essential, and yet no one dared to speak about him much. As if they had all silently agreed that the less they talked about what had happened, the faster their world would return to normal.
And it truly was returning, slowly. Even though the memory of the apocalypse was still fresh, life went on.
Lila threw herself into it. She wanted to make it work. She tried to return to ordinary life, to find comfort in it. She felt like she was rediscovering things that should have been natural—laughter at dinner, dirty hands covered in paint, family walks in the park.
The twins were still too young to understand anything. For them, their mom was still the same mom who sat them down for breakfast in the morning. Only Lila looked at them differently. Every gesture, every smile, she imprinted into her memory, as if she could make up for all the years she had missed.
Diego tried. He went shopping, sometimes cooked—though it usually ended with a burned pan and kids laughing that dad had messed up the pancakes. In the evenings, he fell asleep on the couch while Lila read bedtime stories in the children’s room.
Days slowly turned into routine.
But sometimes, when the kids had fallen asleep and silence settled over the house, she sat alone in the kitchen with a cup of tea. And that sentence came back.
It’s over, Five.
She couldn’t push it out of her head. Her throat tightened every time she realized he wasn’t there. That because of that one sentence, he never walked back into her life again.
She tried not to think about it, at least during the day. With the kids, it was easy—their world was full of moments that didn’t wait for anyone to deal with the past. But at night, when Diego turned to his side and fell asleep quickly, she stared at the ceiling and imagined what it would be like if Five… if he just walked through the door one more time.
And then she always forced herself to close her eyes.
Because life went on. And she had to live it here, with Diego and the kids.
But the marriage was only marriage by name.
At first, they tried—sharing a bedroom, eating dinner together, awkward touches meant to feel natural. But over time, it turned into nothing more than habit. Lila noticed Diego started going to bed later, simply to avoid lying down next to her in silence. One evening, he just took a pillow and a blanket and carried them to the guest room. Nobody talked about it, but from that night on, he stayed there.
They were more like roommates than partners. In the mornings, they met in the kitchen, discussing who would pick up Grace from school, who would go to parent-teacher meetings, who would pay the bills. It worked because it had to. The kids needed stability, so they gave it to them—even though they hadn’t been a family in the true sense for a long time.
Years slipped forward quietly, the way only ordinary life can.
Lila watched them and felt joy in her heart, but also a strange torment. The years she had spent in the subway weren’t reflected in them. The children grew as if there had never been a gap, while she felt like she was trying to glue herself back into a story she had fallen out of.
Diego noticed. He saw how she sometimes drifted off in thought, how her eyes wandered to places he couldn’t follow. And though he stayed silent, one evening the words slipped out.
“You’re still thinking about him,” he said quietly, when he saw her staring out the window. “Sometimes I don’t even understand why you came back.”
Lila looked at him. Her eyes carried both weariness and defiance, but she said nothing.
The children grew up, developed their own personalities, their own stories.
When Grace started high school, the world changed. She was no longer the little girl clinging to her. She started talking about friends, about school events, about movies Lila and Diego didn’t want her to see. And one day, she came home with a shy smile and admitted she had her first job at a café around the corner.
Meanwhile, Diego carried his own weight. And one day, when they fought about Grace sneaking off to a secret party, it broke out of him again.
“I’ve tried for years,” he snapped, while Lila sat at the kitchen table. “But you’ve never been here completely. No matter what I do, there’s always part of you… somewhere else.”
“Diego—” she began, but he cut her off.
“Did you ever even think of me while you were gone?”
The sentence struck her like a wound. She knew the answer wouldn’t help him. Because the silence between them had been speaking louder than anything she could ever say.
Lila knew Diego was seeing another woman. Maybe not just one. He came home late, sometimes with the scent of someone else’s perfume on his shirt, sometimes with a hollow look that had nothing to do with her. She never confronted him. Maybe because part of her was still elsewhere, in another time, with someone else.
Time went on. Grace eventually left for college, the twins grew up and started walking their own paths. The house grew emptier, along with all the excuses Lila had held on to.
Diego spent his evenings on the porch, silent, with a glass in his hand. He no longer asked, no longer blamed. But his eyes said it clearly—he knew that unless one of them made a radical cut, nothing would change.
And Lila knew it too.
The house was quiet.
Lila sat alone by the window, watching the garden. Autumn leaves swirled in the wind, and she felt the years in the subway rushing back to her. Those moments that had belonged only to them.
There was a time when she had believed she could return to the life she had been forced to abandon. That she could forget. But she never truly let go of what she had shared only with him.
And one day, she found that journal again. It had been standing quietly among the books she had ignored for years. Everything was there—routes, possibilities, notes on how to use the subway to always arrive at the right place. And inside, there was a part she had overlooked before: instructions on how to enter the subway even without him.
Lila felt her heart racing. Somewhere deep inside, beneath all the years of routine and habit, a wind of hope began to rise. The time for a decision had come.
On the day of Grace’s wedding, it became painfully clear. Watching her daughter shine in a wedding dress. She was in love and happy. And when Grace took her husband’s hand and Lila wished them well, she realized she could no longer go on living only halfway.
The music swelled, people clapped, and laughter filled the air, but for Lila the sound blurred into a dull echo. She felt like she was watching life from behind a pane of glass—close enough to see every detail, yet forever separated from its warmth. Her daughter was stepping into a new future, radiant and whole, while she herself stood still, fractured.
She loved her children more than anything, and as a mother she had tried to give them all she could. But as a woman, as a partner, she hadn’t felt happy in years.
The sight of Grace’s glowing face cut through her like a blade: proof that love could still be real, that it could be chosen, nurtured, fought for. And in that moment, Lila knew with devastating clarity that she had been lying to herself all these years—pretending survival was enough, pretending routine could replace the fire that once burned in her.
It was as if everything around her unfolded in two layers: in one was the life she lived on the outside, in the other a shadow that never let her sleep peacefully.
The journal flashed in her mind again. Still tucked away among the books, quiet and inconspicuous, but full of possibilities. She knew she could fail, that she might never find him, but the thought, the possibility, echoed louder and louder.
Her hands trembled as she applauded the newlyweds. Tears welled in her eyes—not only of pride, but of grief. Because she finally understood that if she didn’t move, if she didn’t search, she would wither away, haunting her own life like a ghost.
Lila closed her eyes. Fear and hope intertwined inside her. But one thing she knew for certain: if she didn’t try, she would never find peace. And the shadow of Five would never let her rest until she tried to find him.
The decision was made.
Lila stood at the subway entrance with a backpack on her shoulders. Inside were only the bare essentials—she still remembered what it was like to survive with almost nothing. But now she had something more—the journal, meant to guide her to the right path.
She wasn’t on vacation. She wasn’t here for fun or adventure. She was here because part of her life was still trapped somewhere between time and space, and she had to know if she could find her peace.
She imagined that Five might no longer even be alive. Maybe he was gone completely. But still, there was hope—even if small, fragile, unclear.
The moment the subway arrived, a tremor of relief ran through her. As soon as she stepped inside, the metallic resonance of the doors echoed, and the floor rippled beneath her feet. It was silent, metallic, iron—and yet comforting. Suddenly, everything seemed clearer. She felt that she was finally taking a step for herself, a step that belonged only to her.
Her breath caught as the doors slid shut, sealing her inside. It felt like crossing a threshold between worlds—one she could never uncross. Behind her lay years of silence, compromise, and half-lived days; ahead of her, only uncertainty. Yet for the first time in so long, her heart beat with purpose instead of resignation.
She sat down, exhaled. The subway started moving, slowly, with a rhythmic clatter over the rails. With every meter it traveled, the weight of the years she had carried inside her began to fade. That feeling of having lived only halfway, of part of her life stuck in time, started to let go.
She pressed a hand against the journal in her bag, as if to anchor herself. Somewhere out there, maybe beyond countless tunnels and impossible distances, was the man she had never truly let go of. Whether she would find him or not no longer mattered—it was the journey itself that promised to restore her soul.
She was still cautious. She didn’t know what awaited her, or whether Five had survived all those years in the subway. But she was here. And the fact that she was taking the first step, daring to enter, gave her a strange kind of freedom. A freedom she hadn’t felt since the day Five disappeared.