My wife died years ago, or at least that is what I believed for a long time, and every month since then my life followed the same quiet ritual. On the first day of each month, at exactly nine in the morning, my phone would buzz with a familiar notification, and I would feel that small, dull ache in my chest that had become part of who I was.

I never needed to look at the screen to know what it said. It was always the same confirmation from my bank, telling me that three hundred dollars had been successfully transferred. The recipient was always the same too: Doña Clara, my former mother-in-law, the mother of the woman who had once been my entire world and then my greatest loss. Five years, three months, and a handful of days had passed since Marina vanished from my life, but I could never bring myself to say she had died. Death felt final, clean in a terrible way, and nothing about what I lived through felt clean or complete.

To me, Marina didn’t die; she disappeared, leaving behind an empty bed, unfinished conversations, and a silence that seemed to grow louder with time. They told me it was a car accident, that she had been on her way to visit her family in a small coastal village when it happened. The police report was short and impersonal, the kind of document that reduces a life to dates and technical details. The coffin arrived sealed, and they said it was because the impact had been too severe. I remember the funeral like a dream I watched from far away, faces blurring together, voices sounding distant, arms wrapping around me while I felt hollow, like someone had scooped everything out of my chest and left only air behind.