“Hope doesn’t always roar. Sometimes, it blinks on a dying screen.”

The rain fell like ash from the sky—slow, relentless, cold. Smoke still clung to the air from the refinery explosion, curling in gray tendrils that blurred the horizon. I should’ve felt relief that the fire was over, but all I could taste was metal and failure.

Luca and I hadn’t spoken in miles. The silence between us was a wound neither of us wanted to prod. Then, in the middle of that thick, suffocating quiet, my ...