At the restaurant, the realization spread slowly, like a stain. Brian’s fingers froze around the leather folder. Madison’s bracelets chimed against her glass as she snatched the bill, her outrage tripping over the total. Kevin stopped chewing mid-bacon, the number knocking the easy jokes out of him. While they argued about steaks and seafood towers, about who had ordered what and whether Mother’s Day came with a discount on basic decency, Chloe quietly held up her phone: Helen, at the gate, smiling in a cream scarf, Rome in the caption. The table fell into a silence thick with something none of them wanted to name. Back in Virginia’s suburbs the story metastasized—retellings, justifications, friends who didn’t nod along. In Rome, under a sky the color of possibility, Helen walked cobbled streets with no one tugging at her sleeve, their angry messages buzzing against the soft, immovable stone of the Panthe… Continues…