"Someone has broken into your room!"

    Upon receiving that silent warning in her mind, Anila immediately opened her eyes, and their brown colour froze like the crystal surface of a sphere when she recognised the face of the man who approached her bed.

    She was stunned by fear when her dad forcibly removed the blankets that were covering her and didn't let her get up from the bed. He positioned himself on top of her and placed his hand over her mouth just in time before she screamed for help.

    Her lack of strength killed Anila's hope that she would be able to escape, and she closed her eyes, wistfully accepting the repetition of history.

    When she opened her eyes a second later, Anila no longer felt the heavy weight of a body on her, and she instantly half-raised from the bed, took the knife from under the pillow on the right, pushed her body while trembling towards its head, and she used the pale blue blanket as a shield so that no one who could have entered her room could see her body, even though she was wearing black pyjamas.

    The small, lighted lamp showed only the shapes of the furniture and their pale colour. There was no one in her room with the door locked. The recent dream, coupled with the bitter feelings it caused, made her eyes water. The front of her head began to ache, and she clutched her knees tightly to her chest as she sobbed. Was it a sign that she was also in danger from her father, Xhelili, and she had to be careful?

    She lay again with her face towards the window and the black knife in her left hand, not at all ready to use it if she would have to. Sidoreli would have known how to calm her down if she had had the opportunity to call him, but for his sake, she had erased him from her life.

    The terrified face of the tattooist at the sea was ingrained in her mind and made her think that he didn't deserve to have negative memories in his life because of her.

    She couldn't tell him the truth about Blerimi, in order to heal completely, she knew that she would never be able to, and who knew how difficult it would be in the future? He would have continued to stay by her side because he loved her, and because of that love, he could suffer more. She couldn't have done injustice to him like Blerimi had done to her. Sidoreli deserved someone different than she was-someone who didn't have such a past on her shoulders and who was stronger.

    Anila only seemed like that. She gritted her teeth tightly from the silent sobs so as not to wake her parents and her sister from the crying of despair that had taken her hostage and was smashing her soul against the walls filled with the frames of bitter memories from the mistakes that she made with self-awareness, the deliberately missed opportunities, and the bleeding present as much as the wounded heart until it was in its comatose state.

    Blerimi had separated her from Sidoreli. Even dead, he was ruining Anila's broken spirit.

••••
    Sidoreli saw the time 02:34 on his phone and placed it on the adjacent bedside table to the left. She was most likely sleeping peacefully in those moments, free from overthinking and without any regrets about them.

    "Anila, what happened?" He sat at her level.

    "My thoughts are killing me!" She asked for help with her eyes filled with tears, and Sidoreli could only put her hands on her elbows, powerless to erase those thoughts. "I'm very evil!" Anila pressed her fingers into a fist on her head and used hateful force on her hair to pull it out.

    It seemed impossible for such behaviour to have been a game. He had thought that Anila had been pretending, just out of momentary indignation. The intuition insisted, with all the power it possessed, that she hadn't played with him but had decided to heal without him by her side, so that he wouldn't suffer the consequences if Anila didn't succeed.

    He respected her choice, but he didn't want to accept it completely. That's why he hadn't quit his job in the company, because deep down he hoped that Anila would end his exile from her life, prove that they had complete trust in each other, each showing the chapter they were hiding from their past, and they would no longer have any obstacles to being together.

    She just needed more time, although it had been a month since he had talked to her. As soon as she got better, she would come back. He felt an obligation to understand her situation, and rather, driven by not wanting to give up on her, he kept thinking that Anila still loved him.

    That disrupted Sidoreli; the effort to cling to every argument in his favour for her seemed to him as if it were turning into an obsession, and if she found out, she would surely be frightened by him.

    For the reason that she didn't want to have anything to do with him, because she was feeling more bad than good, she had given him her hands, and he only had to truly respect her decision.

••••
    The closing of the main green door of the parents' house managed to remove Anila from the centre of his thoughts and put there the question just asked by his mother, who was sitting to his right on the pastel grey sofa in light sky blue, and her hand was placed on the right arm of Sidoreli.

    " ... sad? What disquiets you?"

    Her worried, soft brown eyes had noticed promptly that something was wrong with him as soon as he had come home to spend the weekend there, by looking at his strained face and his heavy gaze.

    "Nothing," Sidoreli turned his head to the television placed on a white TV stand. Her question had also drawn his father's attention to him. "I'll have to go to Vienna next week for work. That's what I was thinking."

    "Ah." Hygerta believed him right away, that that was the reason why he looked tense. His aversion to travel was something known in the family.

    "Leave it. Don't go," shrugged Alfredi, sitting in the armchair to the right of them, as if that task could be easily abstained from. "I don't understand why you're still in that company. Emanueli has asked you all those times to work as a manager at his gym, and you have refused with the excuse that you didn't want to deal with numbers your whole life; you even went to a business school to have another work opportunity. Now you have burdened yourself many times over."

    "How are you?"

    Sidoreli took advantage of Mateo's entrance into the living room, playing with the zipper of his black hooded jersey from the sports suit he was wearing to avoid explaining to their parents.

    "Very well." Hygerta's smile returned when she saw that her little boy was home safe and sound and seemed to be in a good mood.

    The last three children had taken on the features of her smiling and enthusiastic face to enjoy life. They had the same brightness as the sweet summer sunset in their brown eyes, while the first three sons possessed her husband's authoritative energy and the eye colour as well. They looked like calm and grounded people. They planned in detail first, and then they acted.

    "How was your day?" She stood up and left room for Mateo to sit next to his brother.

    "Great." The latter kicked Sidoreli lightly in the leg. "Why did you come?" he asked rudely, as if he were bullying him. "You don't live here."

    "Sit and stay like a human," Sidoreli retorted harshly in a monotone voice. "Don't be skinned alive today."

    Mateo laughed, not at all scared.

    "How much power some people have only in their minds," he teased.

    "Teo, leave him alone," their mother scolded him.

    "I'm sorry," he approached Hygerta to hug her. "Do you forgive me?"

    "Yes, I forgive you," she said hurriedly. "Now go away. I'll prepare the dinner."

    "Have you forgiven me completely?" Mateo insisted.

    "Absolutely, move." She pushed him away.

    "No, I don't think that you have," he kept playing.

    "Do you want to cook?"

    Mateo stepped back. "I have no idea who you are in such situations."

    "As you wish," she went to the adjacent kitchen, to the right of the television, while he sat down next to Sidoreli.

    "What's wrong with you? You look like your mistress has left you," he started again, pestering him with questions. "Have you argued with anyone?"

    "No," Sidoreli replied emphatically, without taking his eyes off the TV.

    "Mom, do you need any help?" Mateo raised his voice while looking at the kitchen. "Sidoreli can forthwith come and help you," he threw his brother under the bus.

    "You come and help me," Hygerta asked.

    "No, I still don't know you."

    "Come, come. You'll find out here who I am," insisted Hygerta while cutting some tomatoes.

    "No, thanks." Mateo refused. "I think it's better when you're anonymous."

    Sidoreli had gone ahead with his thoughts in Vienna through the photos that he had watched on the Internet, and the first sensation he had experienced wasn't that of discomfort but asphyxiation from the lack of oxygen since Anila would be in Albania in the meantime. How would he be able to stay so far away from her? He was certain that he wouldn't be able to meet her during that period when he would be in Austria.

    The rain outside the Mother Teresa Airport building a week later, when he left for Vienna, led him to the Ionian Sea, where Anila had attempted suicide, and he had been able to stop her in time.

    Why hadn't he done more? Where had he been wrong-that he hadn't been enough for her? When had she decided to give up on him-when she had woken up at night, the last time she had been at his house, and had made up her mind to leave in the morning, or only after she had gotten up?

    He had thought, in vain, that he was strong enough for both of them and would never let her fall. He had knocked her down by not telling her the whole truth, with the excuse that he wanted Anila to get to know him first and then make a decision for him about Amarildo.

    She had escaped from him through the breakup, and Sidoreli had no right to ask to become a part of her life again.

••••
    Anila took the box of sleeping pills from the first drawer of the bedside table and took only one. Maybe it wouldn't hurt her just once, since she was taking that pill on an empty stomach.

    Memories and the regret that she had given up on Sidoreli, the scenarios that he would have already found someone else, and he was very happy, the prediction that her end would only be bitter, she would die like a loser in the war, where she hadn't asked to be a part of, but she was punished as if she had started it, didn't cease to haunt her; that was the reason she took sleeping pills.

    Sidoreli deserved happiness. He had done all those good things for her, taken over a company, and understood every moment of her depression. She had felt his love in her soul, the safety offered by it, and the certain hope that there was really a light at the end of the tunnel.

    And she had loved him. She still did, and she would always regret that unspoken love for him, which would be turned into a stone in her heart, that she hadn't fought hard enough for him.

    But one day she would heal, and if they met after a few years, each with a different path in life, she would ask for his forgiveness. Anila didn't doubt that he would forgive her and that she would also get strength from him to forgive herself.

    If only something had happened between them when they first met in his studio-a sign to have been given to her-that that hadn't been the last time, that they weren't going to face each other as strangers-and she would be convinced enough to give up on Blerimi.

    Or had the sign been given to her, but she hadn't noticed it?

    How reckless she had been at that time! How almost nothing she had known!

    The effect was quick to come to her aid, but it also took her her soul. Despair and overthinking weighed down her head, and she couldn't sleep completely peacefully.

    She was able to stop that agony only in the morning, but that period didn't last long either because Visara's voice in the corridor managed to get through her unconsciousness.

    "...she's probably asleep. She has started taking medicine again to go to sleep. ... Wait while I put the cake in the fridge, and then we can go to her room together."

    Visara would knock for Anila to open the door, but she, besides feeling too lazy to move, didn't even have the strength to get up. Although she didn't use sleeping pills often, they were having a pretty negative effect on the depletion of her physical energy. Sleep was costing her a lot.

    She opened her eyes, exhausted, and closed them to sleep again. Visara would knock twice and give up.

    "Ania."

    Her sister's voice came from inside her room a few minutes later, and she was surprised when she felt her hand on her leg.

    "Anila, wake up. Someone has come to meet you."

    How had she gotten in?

    "I don't want to see anyone," Anila kept her eyes closed. She would ask her later.

    "But this person is very important."

    The pill put her consciousness back to sleep, and Anila didn't say anything else.

    She only heard Visara's cry as the last sound before she was detached from reality, and nothing more.