(Laura’s POV)

Italy didn’t heal me.

Not at first.

It was too beautiful—

too wide, too bright, too loud for someone who felt like a shadow trying to pretend she still had bones.

The residency compound sat on a cliffside in Liguria, overlooking the kind of ocean that poets waste their whole lives trying to describe. The air tasted like salt and lemon and old ruins, and everyone seemed to move slower here, as if time had melted into something soft.

But I arrived feeling like broken glass wrapped in wet paper.

The staff welcomed me with warm smiles; I pretended to return them.

My room was small—whitewashed walls, wooden...