POV: Carmen
Normalcy is the strangest performance of all.
It arrives uninvited, sets the table, and waits for you to pretend you don’t see the wires running beneath the floor. I let it in anyway. I have learned that refusing normalcy outright only sharpens its absence into something that hurts more.
Daniel laughs in the late morning light, delighted by the way Marco makes his shadow dance against the wall. It’s clumsy, improvised, endearing. I watch from the doorway with a mug of tea I won’t finish, cataloging the scene the way I catalog everything now—sound, movement, distance to exits—while another part of me tries to simply be here.
“Again,” Daniel squeals.
Marco obliges, exaggerating the movements, making the shadow stumble. Daniel’s laughter fills the room, bright and unguarded. It lands in my chest like a warm weight.
Life continues anyway.
I step closer and sit on the floor, back against the couch. Daniel crawls toward me on determined hands and knees, slaps my knee once for emphasis, then collapses into my lap like the journey exhausted him. I smooth his hair and breathe him in. He smells like clean cotton and something indefinable that feels like promise.
For a moment—just a moment—the world narrows.
Then my phone vibrates.
I don’t look at it immediately. That’s the compromise I’ve learned to make with myself: give joy a few seconds before you fracture it. When I do check, it’s nothing urgent. A logistics update. A question about permits. The quiet machinery of rebuilding, humming along.
I answer efficiently and slip the phone back into my pocket.
Marco catches my eye. He doesn’t comment. He never does anymore. He understands the balance I’m trying to hold without asking me to explain it.
Later, we take Daniel outside. The air is mild, the garden green and orderly in the way cultivated spaces are—controlled, intentional, safe by design. Alessandra joins us with a stack of reports she pretends not to have brought. Luca lingers near the gate, posture relaxed, eyes scanning out of habit.
“Lunch?” Marco asks, hopeful.
“Yes,” I say. “Here.”
We eat at the long table beneath the pergola, sunlight filtering through slats, dappling plates and hands. Conversation stays light on purpose. Alessandra talks about a bureaucrat who thinks discretion is a personality trait. Luca complains about supply chain delays. Marco listens more than he speaks.
I laugh at the right moments. I mean it, mostly.
And yet, there’s a thin glass wall between me and the scene, as if I’m watching from a fraction of a second ahead. Anticipating. Waiting.
This is the cost of vigilance: you enjoy the moment while preparing to abandon it.
After lunch, Daniel falls asleep in my arms. His weight is heavier lately, solid and real. I carry him inside and lay him down gently, watching his face settle into sleep. The tenderness of it threatens to undo me. I press my palm to my abdomen, feeling the subtle awareness there—another life, quieter, insistent.
Two futures.
One world.
I close the nursery door softly and lean against the wall, breathing through the ache that comes with loving something this fragile in a place that has taught me how easily fragility is exploited.
Marco finds me there a few minutes later. He doesn’t speak at first. He just stands close enough that I can feel his presence without being crowded.
“You okay?” he asks eventually.
“Yes,” I answer. Then, because we’ve learned to be precise: “And no.”
He nods. “Do you want to talk?”
“Not about threats,” I say. “About… this.”
He glances toward the nursery. “This is allowed.”
“I know,” I say. “That’s what makes it feel wrong.”
He considers that. “Because you’re waiting for impact.”
“Yes.”
“So am I,” he admits. “But I don’t want waiting to steal what’s real.”
“I don’t either,” I reply. “I just don’t know how to turn it off.”
“Maybe you don’t,” he says. “Maybe you just learn to live with it without letting it drive.”
That’s reasonable. That’s also harder than anything else we’ve done.
In the afternoon, I work. I always do. I review alliances, approve small expenditures, make a call to a regional leader who wants reassurance without commitment. The work is steady, almost soothing. It gives my vigilance a place to rest without idling.
Still, the feeling persists—like standing beneath a clear sky while sensing pressure change.
At dusk, we gather again on the terrace. The light softens. Daniel wakes and fusses, then settles when Marco takes him, bouncing gently. I watch them and feel the strange duality of my life sharpen: strategist and mother, architect and shelter.
“I wish I could freeze this,” Marco says quietly.
I don’t answer right away. “I don’t,” I say finally. “Frozen things shatter.”
He smiles faintly. “You’re right.”
We sit there as the day fades, letting the normalcy exist without worshipping it. That’s the discipline now—not illusion, not despair. Balance.
Later, alone in the bedroom, I lie on my side and listen to the house settle. The quiet is deep, layered. Not empty. Watchful.
Life continues anyway.
That’s the miracle and the warning.
I place a hand on my abdomen again, feeling the small, private certainty there. I promise myself—again—that I will not let vigilance harden into distance. That I will laugh when laughter comes. That I will hold my children without calculating escape routes every time.
But I also promise something else, just as firmly:
I will not be surprised.
When sleep finally takes me, it’s light and brief. I wake once to the sound of nothing at all, heart steady, senses sharp. The night holds. For now.
Life continues anyway.
And I continue with it—present, watchful, loving, waiting.